The Right Reasons
by CheckRaise
Summary: He's one of the most wanted men in the world. But the truth is more complicated. She's a young adult struggling to make ends meet. And she wishes the truth was more complicated. Longfic, TaKari, AU, no Digimon, T for adult themes, language, sexuality.
1. Meet Cute

The Right Reasons

OOO

Hey all, I've been having a hard time writing lately, been fighting writer's block. So I decided to try something new, since I think it's important to just pick something that you're feeling at that particular moment when you're struggling to write and just run with it. So here's a new idea I've had that might be fun.

This is a longfic crime/romance story. AU on a fictionalized version of Earth, TaKari, no Digimon. Rated T for general adult themes and situations, some language, and some sexuality. I always appreciate reviews and feedback, feel free to leave it.

OOO

Summary: He's one of the most wanted men in the world. But the truth is more complicated. She's a young adult struggling to make ends meet. And she wishes the truth was more complicated. Longfic, TaKari, AU, no Digimon, T for adult themes, language, sexuality.

OOO

Prologue: Meet Cute

"Sweetie, trust me, the reason why you like working with kids is because you've never had to work with thirty of them at the same time."

Hikari Yagami tugged at the right strap of her tanktop, nose wrinkling slightly. She could feel the slight prickle as the fabric pulled off of her skin. She adjusted it a couple centimeters, feeling it immediately re-adhere to her shoulder, sweat acting as glue. She could never quite get used to it, and it wasn't getting any better. Getting worse, actually. Each passing year seemed to bring a couple extra fractions of a degree when early May rolled around, a barely noticeable change that was snowballing into an intolerable daily punishment for everyone who spent time outdoors. Hikari could vaguely recall a time in her youth, when late springs and summers weren't a humid, oppressive torture session. People in the know claimed that the process was man-made, a product of pollution and assorted gas emissions by humankind, and was on track to continue getting worse. One day, so these people said, the entire year would be like this, an unending, unyielding slog of suffering from which there was no escape, unless the human race acted quickly.

She wasn't sure if these claims were accurate. But she was willing to try anything to get things back to the way they were when she was little.

"I...I don't think that's fair," Hikari protested. "Maybe I haven't been with thirty, but...I've been with them a lot. I enjoy being with them. It...it sounds like fun. I think I'd be good at it. And all you have to do is pass a test to get a certification for it." She took a sip from her cup of bubble tea on the small table in front of her. "Hikari Yagami, Pre-academy Instructor. Charged with shaping the formative years of kids, age five and six. I like the sound of that."

Lily gave her head a small shake, long pink hair waving around by the sides of her face. "Come on, darling, you know that's a dying profession anyway."

"There are always going to be kids, Lily," Hikari said, glancing down the sidewalk to her left, crossing her left leg over her right knee. "And pre-academy's required by law."

"There are fewer childbirths every year," Lily pointed out. "Fewer kids, fewer enrollments to pre-academy, fewer instructors required."

"So be it," Hikari argued. "Still enough for me to teach, I might just have to get better at it to get in."

"Just...make sure you actually enjoy being around dozens of five-year-olds before you commit your career to it. You don't get multiple chances at a career path." She raised her cup of bubble tea in the air towards her. "At least, people like us don't."

Hikari lifted her cup up and clinked it against Lily's before taking another drag from it. "Well, I'm only fifteen. Plenty of time for me to think about things, but...I'm telling you. Being around kids? Sign me up for that." She gave a small smile. "Have a few of my own, too."

Lily gave a small snort. "A few?!" She grimaced. "Hikari, dear, uh...I don't want to come across as mean, having this conversation, I...I can imagine how it sounds, but...we're teenagers now, we should start honing in on realistic goals."

"What's so wrong with having a few kids?" Hikari asked, trepidation in her voice as she suspected the answer.

"Having kids is for rich people," Lily said, somewhat bitterly. "You know that, Hikari. So many...hundreds of thousands of units, all the time, all the effort...even one, it's just...that's another thing. Do you really want to spend your entire life around a bunch of trust fund babies? That's all you'll be teaching."

Hikari shrugged. "How does that matter? They're little kids."

"That's what you say now, but just wait until you're in that room every day, and every kid is wearing an outfit that cost four times yours. Gonna get old quick." Lily nodded her head. "You sure you don't want to run with the photography stuff? You're good at that!"

Hikari chuckled. "It's...it's a fun hobby, don't get me wrong. But...is it really more stable than teaching? The, the birthrate thing, it's just a temporary thing, right? Things will...correct, eventually. They have to."

Lily grimaced. "I don't see how it's going to. Not like it's going to get cheaper, and...everyone keeps encouraging people to not have kids."

Hikari sighed. "Yeah, I...I don't know. It's tough for me to believe that...if people decide they really want to have a kid, they can't just...do it." She stared down at what was left of her drink. "Kind of depressing when you really think about it."

"Sure it is. But it's reality."

OOO

"Wrong day for these outfits," Takeru complained quietly, itching his right shoulder with his left hand, glancing down at the brown jumpsuit he had on through the holes in his ski mask. "Holy hell, imagine when we start running around."

Yamato, clad in a roughly identical jumpsuit and mask combination, leaned up against the side of the concrete wall on the left side of the alleyway. "You get used to it." He leaned his large black shotgun up against the side of the wall next to him. "Not today. But eventually."

"Well, that'll be a tremendous help for today," Takeru said dryly. "I understand the mask, but I don't understand why robbers can't be wearing tanktops and shorts. Everyone else is wearing them, why should we stand out?"

"Hey, if you want a bunch of witnesses getting a look at your arm definition and skin tone, good on you," Ken pointed out from Takeru's other side. "But some of us would prefer to not make it easy on the police after this is over."

"See, your friend has the right idea," Yamato scolded his younger brother. "And, I would like to add, seems a good bit more appreciative of me doing this with you kids today."

"Us kids?" Takeru said. "Come on, buddy, this score is legit. Koushiro is your friend too, he's your age, and you know as well as I do that he rarely gets things wrong. We're not holding up a Quik N Easy for a box of quarters here, this is real stuff."

"Yeah, yeah," Yamato acknowledged. "How's it feel, being sixteen years old and minutes away from being one of the most wanted people on the planet? Amazing that anyone is trying something like this these days, much less a bunch of teenagers."

"Yeah," Ken agreed. "We pull this off, we're sure as hell going to make it a lot harder for everyone else in the future to do it."

"That's why we gotta do it now," Yamato replied. "Alright, I want to stress this one more time, because I know the temptation. If our intel is bad, and we get in there and there's only cash, don't touch it. You burn it and run. We can't do anything with it, and don't think you'll be able to find a way. That's how people get busted."

"Don't worry, I know the drill. Bearer bonds or bust," Takeru answered, looking down at the black shotgun in his gloved hands, moving his fingers around awkwardly as he felt the sweat pooling inside of them.

Yamato nodded, looking over to his right, towards a dump truck parked across the alleyway that crossed with the one the three were standing in. "Still feels like it might be a little too good to be true. So many things just perfectly lining up like this. I'm steeling myself to open up the back of the truck and finding bundles of cash. Or nothing."

"I'm more thinking about afterwards," Ken added. "I can buy all the stuff before and during, but...are we really going to be able to disappear after?" He shook his head. "I'm not convinced we're getting more than ten blocks away."

"The powers-that-be have gotten lazy. Nobody tries things like this anymore. They're not ready for something like this." Yamato cleared his throat. "Just keep telling yourself that until this is over."

"Nobody tries things like this anymore," Takeru repeated. "Nobody. And now, four teenagers are gonna try it. When you put it like _that_ , I don't know if that makes me feel all that great."

"Ahem," Yamato said. "First of all, three teenagers. I've left the club, give me full marks, please and thank you." He pointed at the metal door in the wall of the building right next to him. "Second of all, positions." He quickly slapped a small square device on the wall by the door.

Takeru stepped forward, twisting the knob on the metal door and pushing the heavy slab of metal inward. The three quickly stepped into a dark storage room, rickety metal shelves lined up against the walls.

"Gentlemen, count your blessings today. Having a chance to do something like this is a privilege," Yamato added, holding his shotgun up in his right hand, his left hand pulling a rectangular screen from his left back pocket.

The three crowded around Yamato's hand, looking. The alleyway right outside the door was projected on the device, from the point-of-view of the device Yamato had placed on the wall. Pointing off to the right, towards the alleyway that crossed the one they were in. A white van came into view, coming down that alley, slowing down as it approached the cross of the two alleys.

"You think these guys think they're really clever, shaving two minutes off their route by going back here?" Ken wondered out loud as the large van came to a stop right in the X of the crossing, it's route hindered by the garbage truck that was parked in such a way that took up the entire alley.

"Annnddddd…" Yamato said quietly. "Here we go."

In the top right corner of the video feed, they could just barely see a fast-moving vehicle coming right towards the cross of the alleyways from the opposite side. Aimed directly at the side of the van, it was quite clear that it had no plans of stopping short of the van. A second later, the vehicle, a large black truck, plowed right into the side of the van, a loud crunch of metal rang through the midday air. The force of the impact pushed the van right down the alley the three had just been standing in a moment ago, tumbling onto it's side, loudly scraping against the concrete of the alleyway floor. The van coasted past the view cone of the camera, the three quite clearly hearing it violently scrape down the alley.

"We're on!" Ken declared, grabbing the doorknob and yanking the door open.

OOO

The entire block of people froze as the unmistakable sound of metal crashing into metal interrupted everything. Conversations paused, strolls halted, and the ambivalent mood of the day was immediately called into question.

Hikari nearly choked on the last dregs of her tea, head violently jerking to the right, detecting the noises coming from somewhere behind the buildings there. Maybe a block behind the cafe building. Her ears perked up, the cacophonic sounds continuing, as something very heavy was seemingly being tossed around.

"T-that's...are you thinking what I'm thinking?" Lily stammered, standing up from her seat just as the initial chaotic sounds faded.

"Car wreck?" Hikari wondered aloud, also getting to her feet. "Big car wreck?"

OOO

The van was on it's back now, helpless and immobile as an upside-down tortoise, wheels spinning futilely. The three quickly approached, all three of them brandishing black shotguns, trained on the cab area.

"Alright, how's this gonna go?!" Yamato called out loudly, the van's driver visibly stirring in his seat, seatbelt just barely keeping him from falling to the top of the cab. Takeru and Ken went up to the cab, Takeru standing by the near-side window and Ken going to the far-side window. Yamato, meanwhile, went to the back of the truck.

Takeru pointed his shotgun up towards the sky, pumping it and pulling back on the trigger. The violent recoil pushed back against his arms as the weapon erupted into the air, firing a burst of metal ballistics up high, a booming rip sounding from the gun. Quickly, he pointed it back down towards the passenger-side window. "How many of these do you think it would take to get through this window?" Ken also pointed his shotgun up into the air, letting a shell of his own loose.

OOO

The initial burst of gunfire made Hikari's stomach clench. The second snapped her back into reality. She glanced around just as the crowd of people all began sprinting in the opposite direction of the noise, her feet finally obeying her initial instinct of following suit. Lily grabbed her shoulder and yanked her towards the street, Hikari just barely able to grab her purse before turning to run alongside her friend.

"Now I'm thinking something else!" Lily yelped as she broke into a sprint across the five lane road, quickly jumping onto the sidewalk, Hikari right alongside her. "Holy crap!"

With not much mind for anything besides increasing the distance between them and whatever scene was happening a block to the south, the two ran into an alley between two buildings, an apartment complex and a convenience store, in a dead sprint, terrified of whatever violent scene was happening behind them.

OOO

The passenger side door to the cab of the van swung open, Takeru pointing the barrel of his shotgun right at the passenger who hung there, upside down, gravity pulling him towards the roof of the cab.

"Your cooperation is appreciated," Takeru said. "Now, unbuckle slowly and come out." Takeru heard the door on the opposite side open as well, as Ken made similar progress towards taking control of the armed protectors of the van.

Slowly, the man, wearing a dark green uniform re-enforced with a large bulletproof vest and a large black helmet with a glass visor, held on by a strap across his chin, reached over and unbuckled. He quickly fell the half-meter or so to the cab's roof, groaning a bit as he made impact.

"Oh, God…" the uniformed man groaned as he wormed his way out onto the ground right outside the van, Takeru keeping his gun trained on him as he did so. "Oh, hell."

"This'll all be over in a minute, unless you do something you shouldn't," Takeru told him as his entire body wiggled out of the cab.

"That mask ain't gonna help you," he grunted, giving his head a couple shakes, still disoriented. "I hope you boys know that."

"Go sit up against that wall," Takeru instructed, glancing over towards the left wall of the alley.

"I ain't fooling," he continued, nevertheless getting upright enough to crawl over towards the wall Takeru indicated. Takeru took the briefest of glances over towards the back of the van. Yamato, now joined by Daisuke, were backing away from the van a few steps. "You guys don't understand. There ain't a box of nickels back there, I'll tell you that."

"Just shut up," the other uniformed guard spat, having similarly been told to get up against the wall by Ken, getting up alongside his work partner against the wall. "They'll find out the hard way, stop talking."

An explosion ripped through the air as a violent, yet focused blast of energy ignited from the latch on the back of the van. The steel doors flapped open wide, slapping either side of the back of the van, as each door had a small piece blown off.

OOO

Hikari instinctively ducked her head down as the sounds of a sharp explosion sounded off from behind her. Continuing to sprint down the alley, about to emerge out onto the sidewalk on the other side, it occurred to her that if this was the worst-case scenario, no amount of foot speed was going to help her.

"I'd like a couple more blocks between us and that, thank you very much!" Lily panted out loudly as the pair stepped onto the sidewalk, immediately seeing people similarly fleeing to the north all over the street.

"Couple dozen more!" Hikari suggested.

OOO

"Okay, okay!" Yamato yelled out, pointing his shotgun into the back of the truck. "Yeah, one more back here, come on out!"

"Do you guys have any idea what you're stealing?" The passenger-side guard asked, looking over at Takeru.

"Course we do," Takeru muttered in reply.

"You won't be able to hide after this," he continued.

"Dude, just shut up!" the driver demanded.

"I agree," Ken commented as a dazed and disoriented uniformed guard crawled out of the back of the van, Yamato and Daisuke ready to test the durability of the bulletproof vest at any second. Ken pulled a velcro strap on his waist up, yanking a small can from a pocket on his belt. From this can, a thick stream of orange liquid lanced out towards the driver's chin, just beneath his glass visor. The liquid splashed up against his face, the man recoiling and instinctively raising his hands up to try to block the stream. Quickly, however, the man began to go limp, sliding down against the wall, collapsing to the ground.

"Don't worry," Takeru said quickly to the passenger-side guard as Ken took his finger off the top of the can and tossed it over to Takeru. "Just a simple knockout. Half an hour, you'll be good as new."

Before the guard could protest, Takeru aimed the can's nozzle towards his face and shot a roughly identical orange stream at his neck. As was only natural, his hands flew up, trying to protect himself, but the fumes from the liquid were quite strong. Within seconds, he too was unconscious, falling to the ground in a heap.

Takeru turned back towards the van, where Daisuke was still keeping a shotgun-enforced watch on the lone awake security guard. Takeru swept past him, handing off the small can as he kneeled down slightly to peer into the back of the van, hearing the snap of the can as Daisuke utilized it.

"We happy?" Takeru asked, thrilled to see Yamato loading stacks of square pieces of paper into a grey gym bag.

"Very," Yamato replied. The stacks of paper were wrapped in cellophane, holding them together in neat little piles. "Extremely." After loading the last bundle into the bag, Yamato zipped it shut and stood up. "Alright, we just passed the one minute mark since someone probably realized something was wrong, so I give us thirty seconds before we're trapped in here."

Takeru looked up over the upturned van. About ten meters further down the alley, Ken and Daisuke were jumping on a pair of motorcycles parked there. They quickly rode the loud pair of vehicles back over towards the van.

"I think we get A pluses for execution so far," Takeru called out loudly as he jumped onto the back of Ken's bicycle, taking up his spot on the second seat right behind Ken. Yamato took up residence right behind Daisuke. "Daisuke, if it comes to it, remember who's actually carrying the goods!"

The two gunned it down the alley, back towards the direction they had come from, all of them afraid to even look behind them to see if the first set of squad cars had arrived yet.

OOO

Panting heavily, sweat beginning to bead on her forehead, Hikari slowed to a jog, then braked to a halt, cautiously looking behind her as she did so. Lily also stopped alongside her, similarly suspicious of whatever was happening behind. At the least, there were no more out-of-place sounds of violence since the explosion.

The two just gasped for breath for a few moments, caught between feeling they had gotten far enough away and wanting to dash to the other side of the city. It would be quite silly for them to continue to run away from a threat that was such a great distance away that it couldn't possibly reach them, but possibly deadly for them to underestimate the danger.

"Are you...are we good?" Lily asked finally, looking around. They had stopped right in the crossing between two alleys between buildings, four different paths back out to the main streets presenting themselves to the two girls. A red, four-door sedan was parked by the wall near the eastern path.

"I don't know," Hikari admitted, ready to turn and start running yet again if anything suggested it would be prudent. She pointed over towards her left, down one of the paths to the street. "But...my bus gets here in about five minutes right over there."

"O-oh...right," Lily muttered, looking over towards where Hikari was pointing. "Yeah."

An extended silence as the two girls contemplated their options.

"Not worth dying over a bus ride," Lily pointed out.

"I know, but...we're okay now. Right?" Hikari glanced around.

"I guess," Lily said. "Wow, what a...what was that? That wasn't just a car wreck, right?"

Hikari blinked a few times, shaking her head. "Maybe...maybe a car wreck with a heavily-armed, very angry driver."

"Alright, sweetie," Lily said, coming over and embracing Hikari in a hug. "Well, I...I should get home anyway, I guess."

Hikari returned the hug. "Intense experiences that are shared with friends are supposed to make the friendship closer, right?"

"Something like that," Lily replied. "Alright, you catch your bus, and if _anything_ feels unsafe, you start running until you get to Oakford, got it?"

Hikari grinned. "I'm more of a short-distance runner, you know. Not in shape for a marathon."

Lily turned towards the west exit. "See you tomorrow."

Hikari nodded, still feeling a bit worn by the unexpected stress of the situation. As Lily walked off, leaving her alone, she wandered over towards the brick wall by the eastern path. Putting her back up against the cool surface, she inhaled deeply, trying to bring her heart rate back down.

She glanced down the alley, towards the street, relieved by the sight of people calmly strolling around. It was as if she was on another planet, where there had been no such chaotic event. People just went about their business, reminding her that she could now get back to hers. She allowed herself the chance to realize that there was a large green dumpster right next to her, and her deep inhalation had absorbed an unpleasant amount of the foul odor. Even as her face wrinkled in realization, she was happy that she was able to care about something as mundane as this.

Glancing over, she saw Lily had disappeared from her view. She was about to turn to leave the alley herself, when her senses perked up at the sound of a loud roar coming towards her. Already prepared to jump at the slightest provocation, Hikari turned to see a pair of motorcycles cruising right towards her, engines growling.

Waves of realization came quickly as she stared towards the oncoming, double-seated motorcycles. They were coming from the south. The men were all wearing black masks. They had jumpsuits that matched, making the four of them look identical from a distance. The puzzle completed in her mind, but by the time she realized she should be running, the two cycles were already mere meters away. She spun to take off, but her strappy white sandals slipped on a wet spot and she fell face-first onto the concrete.

Of course. Years of effort spent on staying healthy and in shape, years of gymnastics, yoga training...and when her life actually depended on it, of course she would faceplant like a drunk man playing hopscotch. She would have been more furious at the irony if she wasn't busy being terrified. She gave a quick, sharp scream as she rolled over onto her back, watching as the motorcycles were quickly dismounted by the four mysterious individuals, the vehicles crashing into the side of the building.

"Damn, wrong place wrong time," one of them muttered, clearly looking right at her. The four approached her rapidly. She saw that each of them had a large gun strapped to their backs. She couldn't remember ever being quite so terrified in her life.

She did the only thing she could think of. Quickly dropping her purse from her right shoulder, down into her hand, she tossed the beige bag onto the ground in front of her and then put her hands up next to her head, palms out towards the four.

"Take it! Please, all yours, take it!" she managed to whimper out, hoping beyond hope that the thirty-three units and three generation old cell phone might be enough to save her life. The four took no notice of the purse, and Hikari simply squeezed her eyes shut, sure that this was it.

And then, nothing happened. Dying of curiosity, she reopened her eyes. The four had seemingly walked right past her. She turned, watching as the last of the four simply passed right by.

"Don't worry, we're not here for your money," he said casually towards her. She glanced over, realizing the four were getting into the red sedan. "Just maybe don't say too much to the police. They won't be able to do anything with it anyway."

With that, he pulled open the back left door of the car and jumped in. The other masked men jumped into the other doors, and the car hummed to life. With Hikari still frozen in shock, the car rolled forward, speeding down the alley. She watched it get out to the road, turn left, and disappear from sight.

Hikari blinked rapidly a few times, adrenaline keeping her hyper-alert of everything happening around her. Her stomach hurt. She felt ready to hyperventilate. She glanced down towards her purse, undisturbed on the ground where she had put it. With great effort, she swallowed down hard on the lump in her throat. Seconds ticked by, as she dared to hope it was over and things were normal again.

She felt the urge to vomit, so she focused on some calming breathing exercises. She tried to take in the fact that, despite everything, she was alive and unharmed, and whatever had just happened clearly had nothing to do with her.

And then, both abandoned motorcycles erupted into flame, a roaring fire kicking up and engulfing both of them. She screamed and rolled over onto her stomach, abandoning her attempts to suppress it and simply vomited onto the ground.

After letting it pass, she was completely exhausted, rolling back over onto her back and collapsing in a sweaty heap, closing her eyes. She didn't care that she was laying down in a dirty, grimy back alley right next to her own vomit, she didn't care that there was at least a tiny chance that there were more threats than just those four coming and that she should be running, she didn't care that someone could walk by right now and take her purse and she wouldn't even notice. Exhaustion enveloped her. She sincerely hoped that she might go to sleep and wake up in her bed, at six in the morning, with a chance to start a new day that might just be more like the day she had had hundreds and hundreds of times in her life previously. A reset. That's what she needed. A big reset.

She wasn't sure how much time passed, but she was startled out of her rest by the squeal of tires. She jolted up. A police squad car was braking in the alley a few meters from her, a uniformed officer of the law quickly dismounting from the driver's seat. She pushed herself up into a sitting position as the officer approached.

"What are you doing here?" he quickly demanded, looking down each of the four alleys. "Why are you laying there?"

"U...uh…" Hikari suddenly realized how dry her mouth was. She swallowed down again. "I…"

"Come on!" the officer yelled. "Time sensitive matter, girl!" He looked over at the burning motorcycles.

"Oh, I...I heard the...the stuff." She pointed down south, from where she had run. "I ran here."

"The stuff?" the officer repeated.

"The...the crash and the gunshots," she spilled out quickly, feeling her panic return at the demanding nature of the policeman. "I ran here with my friend, she left, I...I was about to go. Then...they drove through here." She pointed at the burning cycles.

"They?" He reached up towards his neck, grabbing a walkie-talkie mounted on his shoulder. "This is Riggs, I'm in an alley by 41st and Onyx, I think I found the motorcycles."

"Four men in...they were wearing masks," Hikari panted out.

Riggs snapped his neck over to look at her. "You were here when they passed through?"

"Y-yeah…" Hikari nodded. "They...they got in a car."

He went over to her, bending down over her. "What'd they look like? Quickly!"

"Uh...they all had the same masks. Ski masks, black," Hikari said. "They all wore the same jumpsuits. Gloves, I'm pretty sure."

"Colors?" he quizzed.

"Uh...brown!" Hikari managed. "Yeah, the jumpsuits, they were brown."

He reached back up to his walkie-talkie. "Alright, I've got a witness. We've got four individuals, black ski masks, brown jumpsuits, we'll confirm that with the security guards when they're awake." He looked back down at her. "Car? What about the car?"

She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to visualize everything. "It was red. Sedan. Definitely had four doors."

"Make? Model?! Plate?!" he demanded, motioning with his hands for her to hurry up.

"I don't know, I don't know cars," Hikari replied, shaking her head.

"Psh!" the officer said, giving an annoyed grunt. "Of course!" Nevertheless, he turned away and grabbed the device by his shoulder again. "They switched to a red four-door sedan, probably about…"

Hikari glanced down towards her watch, thinking, trying to piece together the timeline of the last ten minutes.

"Three minutes ago?" Hikari said loudly, trying to offer something useful.

"Are you asking me, or are you telling me?" the officer asked, turning back towards her.

"Three minutes ago," Hikari said, nodding.

"About three minutes ago," he continued. "Get a fire truck over here, they set the motorcycles on fire, we're gonna want to put it out as soon as possible." He pointed over towards Hikari as he went over to where the tire skid marks from the car were. "Stay there. You're gonna have to go down to the station to talk about this."

Hikari wanted to reply, but quickly thought better of it. She glanced over towards the street to her right, then sighed and fell back heavily against the ground, realizing that she wasn't going to be catching her bus today.

OOO

"Would I get punched in the face right now if I suggested that I think we've pulled it off?" Ken asked, turning his head around to look in the back seat, at Yamato and Takeru. "Because I'm starting to feel pretty good about this."

Takeru sighed, reaching up to itch at his nose underneath his mask. "I'm not gonna feel good about anything until I get out of this shit."

"We'll change as soon as we get to the second car," Yamato reminded him. "Just hold on."

Daisuke smoothly pulled the car into the rightmost lane, glancing around at the road in front of him. "Please tell me what we got back there was worth it."

Yamato put the gym bag in the seat between him and Takeru. "Why don't you tell em?"

Takeru eagerly reached over, grabbing the zipper and yanking it down. The prize inside was a collection of eight bundles of paper, each one maybe three centimeters thick. Takeru grabbed one, holding it up in front of him. The first sheet of paper in the stack was shaded green, bordered by an intricate pattern of weaving lines. In each corner, the number '10000' was printed in large lettering. The actual document contained a giant wall of text. Takeru chose to focus on the top section.

"This document entitles the bearer to the sum of ten thousand units," Takeru read off, voice rising with every word.

"Holy SHIT, it's the big ones!" Ken yelped, turning around to look at the prize in Takeru's hands. "Ten grand a bond!"

"The signature of Ellis McQuarters in the corner," Takeru continued. "And...the best part." He looked up at Ken. "Not a serial number in sight!"

"So we're just assuming that the entire stack is those?" Daisuke asked, glancing up into his rearview mirror as he pulled into an alley. "It's gonna suck if the rest of those are just printer paper."

"Well, we're not opening the wrappers now," Yamato said. "But let's go ahead and assume the best. One hundred bonds per bundle, one million units per bundle, and we, gentlemen, just scored eight million units in a heist that took barely over one minute!"

"I resent that," Ken countered. "That discounts the months we spent putting this together, as well as the time we're spending now getting away."

"But, more importantly, holy shit, eight million units," Takeru pointed out.

"Yes, also that," Ken agreed.

"You grabbed your camera, right?" Takeru asked, watching as Daisuke turned back into the road, following the carefully planned route down back roads and sparsely populated areas.

"Of course," Yamato replied. "You didn't know that girl, did you? By the car?"

Takeru shook his head. "No, never seen her before. I just wanted to be polite."

"If you did know her, that'd be a big problem," Yamato said cautiously. "Huge. Just saying."

"Don't worry," Takeru assured him. "She didn't get anything on us that those security guards don't have. Nothing to it."

"Not true," Daisuke pointed out. "She may have not made us, but she definitely made this car. I'm sure this ride's about to be part of an all points bulletin any minute now."

"Luckily, in eight minutes this car's going to be going up in flames," Yamato said.

Takeru replaced the pack of bonds in the bag and zipped it back shut. "Eight million units, how...how was this not harder? How was this not being escorted by a dozen armored vans? How were there not a hundred guards?"

"Hey, sometimes the establishment gets fat and lazy," Yamato said. "Been too long since someone did something like this, they think there's nothing to worry about." He looked over at his younger brother. "Can you imagine how giddy dad would've been about this?"

"Dad dreamed about something like this every day, I just know it," Takeru replied. "Emphasis on dreamed. Never thought it could be done."

"Alright, everyone, so far, so perfect," Yamato said, leaning back in his seat. "If we're right, that's more than a million and a half per man, but this is going to be a long process. Finding buyers is going to take a while, but there are always buyers for bearer bonds. Could be months, just be patient."

"Koushiro's got this," Ken said. "He's got patience down to a science."

"Furthermore, we should commemorate this moment," Yamato continued. "Before today, we were passive objectors. We sat and we seethed, not even registering. But now, after this...now we're really playing ball. And that, that means more than any amount of money."

"Good shit," Daisuke said, changing lanes as the sedan rumbled down the street.

OOO

"I...I really hope something I said was useful," Hikari said, leaning forward over the desk, staring right at a plainclothesman opposite her, who was seated in front of a laptop computer. "I...I should have looked at the license plate, but I panicked."

"Don't worry," the man replied. "Most people don't think about things like that when facing a crisis. And sorry about Riggs, I'm sure he was less than polite. He has a very particular way of talking with people, we all have to deal with it."

Hikari nodded. "I wish I could say more, but...I think that's all I have," she said. "Whatever it was these people did, I'm sure it was really bad. I'd like to help stop them."

Brooks sighed. "You'll know as soon as you get home, every news station will have it leading, so...doesn't really matter." He cleared his throat, giving her a bit of a sardonic look. "Those four robbed an armored truck and made off with bearer bonds. Eight million units in bearer bonds."

Hikari gasped, eyes going wide. "You're...you can't be serious!"

He nodded. "I know. Eight million units. Nothing close to this has happened in over a decade, and now...this kind of thing should be impossible." He shook his head. "Unreal. Best I can say is that the corporations who were exchanging them can both afford it, but...who skimps on security when you're moving that kind of coin?"

Hikari nodded. "I...I think I could live to five hundred and never make that much money, so…"

"Hey, me too, we got something in common," Brooks replied. "Well, I'll go ahead and clear you to leave, I think we've got…" his eyes dropped down to his computer screen. "Oh. Well, looks like they found your red sedan."

Her face brightened, leaning forward again. "O-oh, they got them?!"

"Uh...not quite," he said, grimacing. "They found it torched. About...seven miles from where you were, further uptown. They switched vehicles again." He shrugged. "That's not gonna be good for the trail."

Hikari's face fell a bit. "O-oh…"

"Don't worry about it, you...you gave us more than we had," Brooks assured her. "They...that's too much money to get away with, we'll nail them."

She stood up, brushing off her front. "Uh...sir, do you think...I have anything to be afraid of? From these guys? They definitely saw me there, so…"

"Oh, I don't think so," Brooks said. "These guys clearly just wanted money, you were just in the wrong place." He shook his head. "And I don't think you've said anything that'll have any long-term ramifications in the case, so...you should be fine.

Hikari nodded. "Thank you, sir, I...I'll get out of your way now. Good luck."


	2. Very Different Coins

Chapter One: Very Different Coins

Hikari laid flat on her back on the mat. The soft, twanging music filled her ears. She took in a deep breath, pushing it back out. Then, she pulled her feet up towards her and placed her hands, palms down on the mat, by the sides of her head. Slowly, she pushed herself up into a back bridge, her torso inching upwards. Before long, she was sharply curved, an impressed U-bend in her body. She held this position for several long seconds, faintly aware of her cat strolling underneath her, crossing underneath the bridge as it were.

Slowly, focus on being deliberate and careful, she lifted her feet up off the mat, shifting her weight towards her upper half as she raised her legs up high into the air. She could feel her cat scampering away from her as she brought her elbows down towards the ground. Soon, she was doing a slightly easier handstand, her forearms resting against the ground to support her as her legs were bent, bare feet dangling up above her head.

Before long, she pushed up into an actual handstand, palms supporting her entire weight, body a straight, rigid line. Sweat caking her skin, soaking into her blue tanktop, she glanced over slightly to see her cat watching from a few feet away.

Working hard to maintain balance, she began to swing her legs down, bending at the waist and bringing her long, slim legs down, spreading them out wide, pointing her toes out to either side of her as her arms continued to support her weight.

She heard her front door click open, the wooden panel swinging inward.

"If my clocks are wrong and it's time to leave now, I'm going to scream until the window cracks," Hikari said, holding her position. She gave her head a quick shake, brown hair sending flecks of sweat in every direction.

"You've got twenty-five minutes, gumby," Lily replied, taking a few steps into the room and swinging the door shut behind her.

"I'm _almost_ positive I've asked you not to call me that," Hikari said with a small smirk, as she brought her legs together in front of her and began crossing them.

"Well, stop being him," Lily retorted. "Come on, now you're just showing off."

Hikari was sitting a few inches above the ground, her arms going through the hole between her crossed legs, palms supporting her. Gradually, she eased herself back down to the floor. "To who? Miko?"

Lily kneeled down towards the ground, beckoning towards the white cat. "You've got plenty of time, I just came over early to say hello to Miko." The cat quickly came over to the visitor.

Hikari put her left leg out to her side, then grabbed her right leg and began to pull it up, getting it up until her face was pressing into her shin. "You should start doing this. I don't think I'd be able to get through the week without it, it'd help you."

"I am so many levels away from a human being who would even consider trying things like that," Lily replied, stroking the back of the cat, watching with amusement as she arched her back around. "Almost hurts to watch."

"Well, start somewhere," Hikari suggested. "We're both on our feet all day, keeping your body limber does wonders and it helps with the pain."

She nodded absentmindedly. "I suppose it's cheaper than acupuncture." She scratched the back of Miko's neck. "So, you wanna hit Scrave after work tonight?"

Hikari switched legs, bringing the left one up towards the ceiling. "I've got reading to do. Besides, I never enjoy myself when I go to Scrave after work. Don't know how you do either. Ten hours of running around in that damn uniform, going to a club not exactly my idea of a good way to recuperate."

"Yeah, it's not perfect, but...sometimes you have to force yourself to go out and have fun, or else you lose the will to do anything." Lily picked Miko up off the ground, hugging her to her chest gently.

"That's the thing," Hikari muttered, putting her leg back down and turning to look at her friend. "Not positive it's very fun to go out when your feet are both screeching in agony." She pulled her feet underneath her and stood up. "Either way, like I said, I've got some folders to study."

Lily fought not to roll her eyes. "You know, you don't have to spend every free moment you have with those readings," she pointed out. "You're nineteen! Still a kid, by some estimations. That pre-academy instructor certification isn't going anywhere."

"Hey, you're the one who kept telling me it's a shrinking field," Hikari pointed out. "And every day closer to getting that certificate is one day closer to me not being a waitress anymore, and personally, I'm willing to do any and all things to bring that day closer."

"Oh, come on, Sandara's not bad at all," Lily countered. "We could be doing much worse. And the pay is better than average."

"Yeah, not for nothing," Hikari replied, glancing around her apartment. Only a few notches above the barest of bare bone living, the apartment consisted of nothing more than one main room and a half-bathroom. On entering, the kitchenette was immediately to the left, with the bedroom occupying the other half of the room, just enough space for a single bed and room to move around it. "Maybe there's worse out there, but it's awfully grueling work to then turn around and barely be able to get by."

"We're still teenagers," Lily reminded her. "Things get better as the years go by, that's how it is for everyone."

"Well, I'd prefer to accelerate the better," Hikari said, stretching her arms up high above her head. "Just thinking about still working there when I'm twenty-two or twenty-three, it's...I don't even want to think about it." She winced. "I want to pass that test. After I get through that, maybe it'll be time to have fun."

Lily nodded. "I understand, just...don't burn yourself out." She set Miko back down on the floor, letting her scamper off. "There wouldn't be any shame in working as a waitress for a few years."

"Shame," Hikari repeated, moving towards the bathroom door on the right wall. "Not worried about shame." She opened the door. "Alright, I'll be ready to leave in twenty."

OOO

"I'm lead to understand that, at this point, it would be polite of me to offer to make you breakfast."

Takeru slipped out of his bed, sliding underneath the covers, coming out standing by the side of his bed. He reached up to a hook on the wall and removed a green bathrobe from it, smoothly tossing it on. The green-eyed brunette on the right side of his bed looked up at him as he covered himself.

"So, I'd _like_ to do that, but I must confess I don't know the first thing about cooking, so...either we can have cereal, or we can order something to be delivered up. Your call," Takeru explained, shoving his feet into his house slippers.

"My job provides breakfast for me, don't worry about it," she answered, sitting up in the bed, using the blanket to cover her chest with her right arm. "You worked hard enough last night, it'd be greedy for me to ask you to work any harder on me."

Takeru gave a small grin. "True. What are you covering up for anyway? Nothing I haven't already seen, you know that."

"Force of habit." She rotated herself out of the bed, reaching down towards the floor, where her clothes was piled. "Speaking of work, I've actually got to get out of here, I'm working a flight to Haverban that leaves in a couple hours."

Cinching the waist rope around him, Takeru nodded. "Feel free to use the shower, all yours."

"Thank you, I'll just be a few minutes, I promise," she said, standing up after getting minimally dressed.

"Take all the time you need," Takeru encouraged, taking a few steps towards the door leading out of the bedroom and opening it. "I'm in no hurry."

The main room of the apartment was quite large, serving as a hub for the entire area. On the same wall as the main bedroom door, there were other doors on either side. The left one was for a secondary bedroom, and the right one led to the bathroom. A kitchen filled the left corner of the room, closest to the primary door leading out of the apartment. A desk with three computer monitors was on the right side. As Takeru strolled out into the middle of this area, his female companion scampered over towards the bathroom door.

He ambled over towards the computer monitors, tapping the control key on the keyboard three times as he picked up a headset and put the microphone up to his mouth. "Alright nerds, I'm awake, so give me...maybe forty-five minutes and I'll bury all comers on any map you want."

The computer screens sprang to life, revealing several applications visible on all of them, Takeru quickly scanning with trained eyes everything in front of him. He eased himself down into the computer chair behind him, quickly investigating to see if anything interesting was of interest to him.

He heard assorted voices from his headset, choosing to ignore them for now. He didn't have time to get into a conversation yet, with a guest only a few minutes away from exiting his bathroom. A headline caught his eye.

"Pyonga considering joining Global Exclusive Trade Partnership after initial local resistance," he muttered under his breath. "Lovely." He spent a few minutes catching up on the top stories, discerning which ones were of particular interest to him. Before he knew it, the bathroom door was popping open, revealing his prior bed partner now wearing her blue blouse and green pencil skirt.

"You weren't kidding," Takeru said, turning towards her. "That was fast."

"Fast showers are a skill I've worked hard to cultivate over the years," she replied, skipping across the room towards the door. "Well, it was a wonderful night, you've got a fantastic place, I—"

A series of knocks from the front door of the apartment cut her off, Takeru's forehead wrinkled for a moment as he looked over at the door, then he suddenly blinked rapidly a few times in succession. "Oh, shit! Right, right." He rolled his eyes. "Y-yeah, go ahead, I know who it is."

She complied, crossing the last few steps to the front door and undoing the latch, then turning the knob. On the other side of the threshold, a tall, thin young man with short red hair stood, casually dressed in a plain white shirt and green jacket with tan cargo shorts and white sports sandals. Taken aback for a brief moment at seeing who had replied to his knock, he stood there in silence for a few moments.

"You're one of Brian's friends, right? He's here," she indicated, pointing over towards the opposite end of the room, where Takeru was sitting.

The visitor didn't have much of a reaction to this, staring rather dully at the attractive brunette for a moment. She turned to the side to slide her feet into a pair of flip-flops.

"You're here to meet Brian, right?" she continued. He leaned forward a bit to look over at Takeru.

"Uh...yeah," he finally acknowledged, nodding a few times. "Here to meet Brian. Yeah."

"Alright, well, I'm just leaving, so he's all yours," she said. "Bye now!" she called out over her shoulder.

"Y...yeah, wait!" he called out towards her retreating back. She stopped, turning to look at him. "D-did you remember your phone?"

She gave him an odd look. "Yeah, I...I could never forget my phone somewhere and not realize it after two minutes."

"O-okay, good, see ya," he said, stepping inside the apartment and closing the door. "What's up...Brian?"

Takeru stood up, shrugging. "You just saw what was up, Koushiro. Twelve hours ago, me and her, we didn't even know the other person existed. Isn't that just beautiful?"

"You just met her last night?" Koushiro said, taking a few steps into the room towards the couch and coffee table near the middle of it. "You gotta tell me where you're meeting these women, I couldn't get a woman to spend the night with me on the first date unless I pick them up from the red light district." He thought for a moment. "That's not your secret, is it?"

"No," Takeru said, approaching his friend. "I don't do prostitutes, too sterile." He blinked a few times. "And sometimes not sterile enough." He pointed towards the apartment door. "Flight attendant. Legit profession." He rolled his eyes. "I couldn't convince her to wear the uniform last night, but...give me a few more evenings, I'll find the combination to the safe."

"Well...it's important to have goals in life," Koushiro replied dryly. He raised his right hand up into the air and ran his index finger around in a circle. "Otherwise, what's the point of it all?"

Takeru turned back towards his computer desk, reaching underneath the desk towards the power strip that had a half-dozen plugs in it. He flipped a switch on the strip. Immediately, the computer powered off, the screens also going black. "Okay, we're good."

"You sure that's it?" Koushiro asked, looking around the room. "Nothing else in here?"

"Well, if you're really feeling paranoid, you can unplug the microwave," Takeru offered, pointing at the kitchen. "My phone's in the bedroom, so as long as you turned yours off, we're good."

"Okay, so…" Koushiro paused for a second, squinting over at Takeru. "You...you haven't showered yet, have you?"

"I forgot you were coming, full disclosure," Takeru admitted. "I had a...significant distraction, I just got up, and wanted to be the gentleman who let the lady use the shower first."

"Right, well…" Koushiro thought for a moment. "More importantly, I'd recommend strongly against using more than one name. It's something that can attract attention, I feel like I've mentioned this before."

"I felt like a Brian last night," Takeru replied. "And I don't think the government is going to waste any time with some twenty-year-old idiot who likes to adopt different personas to pick up women."

"What happens when two of these women meet each other and one of them thinks you're Brian and the other thinks you're Steve?" Koushiro asked.

"Well, on the day that I'm _that_ unlucky, I will surely have already been hit by three bolts of lightning at the same time while being headbutted by a rhinoceros into the path of an oncoming freight train," Takeru joked. "So I'll have bigger problems. Now, what do you have for me, because in case you can't tell, I am incredibly bored."

"You seem to be having a ton of fun to me," Koushiro suggested. "You sure you even wanna hear what I have to say?" He shrugged. "Playing video games, having a series of shallow and simple hookups, waking up whenever you want, that's not half bad."

"Come on, man, that's not what this was about, you know that," Takeru insisted, going over to the kitchen counter, placing both of his hands down on it, and leaning over towards Koushiro. "Nothing's changed. Now come on, enough with the foreplay. Please tell me you wouldn't actually come all the way over here without something concrete."

Koushiro nodded, eyes bulging a bit. "Yeah, I do. But, before we get into it, are you sure you're invested? Because people who _are_ fully invested in this get taken down all the time. Taken down trying to do things way smaller than this. I mean, we got away with it once, it's...arguable that pushing your luck beyond that would be stupid."

"Koushiro." Takeru stared over at his friend. "Four years ago, I was committed to this. I'm more committed now. I'm not going to be satisfied if the only thing I manage to accomplish is...taking eight million units from a corporation that barely even felt it. That doesn't mean anything. Doesn't do anything." He nodded a few times. "If I stopped here, then I'm just a...just a thief. That's not good enough."

"Well, if you're sure," Koushiro said.

"I'm sure. You know I've spent most of the money on preparations for something bigger anyway." Takeru glanced over towards his off computer. "The money's pretty much all gone now too, and it's not like I can just suddenly going into telemarketing or something."

Koushiro tilted his head to the right. "Actually, that could be arranged. Haven't quite hit that point of no return yet."

Takeru smirked. "You know Daisuke actually stole a car for some...I don't remember, some collector guy. Stole a Gulmir, forty year old car, from this old guy."

Koushiro's forehead wrinkled. "Well that's stupid. He didn't say a word to me, what the hell is he thinking, doing something like that without me backing him up?"

"He knew you wouldn't like it," Takeru said. "To be clear, he didn't either, he knows that kind of shit hurts the wrong people. He just needed the money."

Koushiro rolled his eyes. "He knows I'm working on something big, don't give me that nonsense." He scoffed. "How stupid would he feel if he got taken down on something as trivial as that?"

"Fine, call it...idle hands. Give him something to do. Yeah, sure, he knows you're working on something big, you're always working on something big." Takeru swept over towards the refrigerator, pulling it open and bending down to peer inside. "And then, it's always...oh, it was a dead end, or, it's too dangerous, or, we need to lay low for awhile longer."

"We always knew we were gonna have to lay low for a few years," Koushiro reminded him. "We disappeared with eight million units in untraceable bonds, we singlehandedly accelerated the abolishment of bearer bond printing altogether by at least a decade, you don't just do that stuff and expect everything to be normal after a few weeks."

"Okay, well, it's been a few years. Four years now, if...if we can't move on something now, then who says we'll ever be able to? I can only speak for myself, but...I'm willing to risk it." He stood back up after grabbing a piece of banana bread in a plastic wrap. "You got something out there worth my time, I'll take a risk. Daisuke will too, just...let's just go with something."

"Alright, well, tell Daisuke to knock it off, because he's not helping anything by taking the prized possession of a senior citizen to give it to someone who has a whole garage full of them," Koushiro insisted. "And tell him that I've got a green light. Angelique."

Takeru ripped the wrapper off the banana bread. "Oh. Koushiro, you know _just_ what to say to put me at ease."

OOO

Hikari finally relaxed her hands on the handlebars on either side of her as Lily brought the scooter to a gradual halt right in between two parked motorcycles. Color returned to her knuckles as Lily killed the engine. Hikari swung her right leg over to the left, dismounting from the back seat and dropping to the ground.

"Oh, God, it's gonna be hell," Lily muttered as she got off of the chrome scooter as well, looking up at the relaxing blue sky. "If you can sneak a crank down on the air conditioning when nobody's looking, I'd appreciate it."

"Yeah, if I decide at some point today that I don't want this job anymore, maybe," Hikari replied, adjusting the strap on her pink backpack. "Just stick your head in the freezer room every time things slow down."

"That's a half-measure," Lily complained. The two quickly walked around the side of the building, out to the front. A green, single story structure with a large colored cloth overhang over the front, with two tables on either side of the front door. The two girls made straight for this front door, a glass pane with a golden handle.

"Just hold it together," Hikari said in a low voice as they entered the building. Inside were rows of circular tables and wooden chairs surrounding them. "Just think, after we're done today, we get to do it all over again tomorrow."

"Ha ha," she replied dryly, both of them headed straight for the hallway in the back left of the room. "Well, three days from now you'll be here and I'll be asleep, so at least there's that."

"It's the little things in life," Hikari replied.

"Finally!"

A large man with long black hair emerged from the hallway just as the two were about to enter it. He looked the two young women over, holding a clipboard in his left hand.

"Just in time, I was about to call you two," he said, sweeping his right hand towards the hall. "Alright, let's go, we're opening in twelve minutes, uniforms!"

He moved to the side, allowing the two women to squeeze past him, into a narrow hall with two doors on either side. "Yeah, Mister Mays, about that, have you taken our request into consideration?"

"Kari, do I look like someone who can afford a new set of uniforms for ten waitresses?" Mays replied, putting his arms out to the side.

She bristled a bit. Her friends and family called her Kari. Harold Mays wasn't really either.

"It's an investment," Hikari continued, holding her backpack up in the air after shrugging it off her shoulder. "These are _definitely_ cutting down on productivity and morale during the summer, and summers are only getting longer and hotter."

"That's a twelve hundred unit investment, minimum," Harold retorted. "Come on, it can't be that bad, the skirt barely goes halfway down your thigh."

"I can barely notice, the socks go up past my knees," she complained, walking down the hall as Harold followed. "We don't need a whole new uniform, just a short-sleeved or sleeveless top, and then we remove the knee socks, and we're good!"

"Maybe in a couple months," Harold said dismissively. "We don't have time for an equipment debate right now, go get ready."

Hikari, grabbing the doorknob to the first door on the left, turned back to her boss. "Can I at least wear ankle socks? I brought them from home, it wouldn't cost you anything!"

"I'd have to have a staff meeting to sync up new uniform regulations first," Harold said. "That's my last word."

Hikari, making sure to not roll her eyes until after Harold had turned away, twisted the knob and entered a small room with a dozen grey lockers on the far wall. She went to the one fourth from the left, Lily the one to her immediate right, yanking it open with an excessive amount of force.

"Staff meeting," Hikari grumbled under her breath. "Yeah, that's the problem, I'm sure." She put her feet onto the floor of the open locker, letting her flip-flops slide off on the bottom.

"Hey, I think you've got him at least considering it, that's progress," Lily encouraged.

Hikari sighed, unzipping her backpack and reaching in to remove and unfurl a light blue outfit, very much like the uniforms she had to wear in school in her teens. A sailor fuku, a blouse and collar up top with a short pleated skirt on bottom.

"And for whatever it's worth, you sure know how to _rock_ the fuku," Lily added.

OOO

"You _better_ be entertaining today, buddy," Takeru said immediately on the front door of the apartment sliding open. "I was all ready to spend the day destroying cocky punks on Converge, and then, duty dragged me here."

Ken reached his right hand out towards Takeru. Takeru took it, coming in close to his friend, yanking on his arm. Takeru gave Ken a couple slaps on the back.

"Good to see you too," Ken replied. "I promise to be charming."

"Uh-huh," Takeru replied. He raised his right hand in the air, index finger pointing up, moving it around in a quick circle.

"Alright, not in the mood for foreplay, I get it," Ken said, moving to the side and motioning down the hallway to his right. "Game room, I've got the board all set up, we're ready to go."

Takeru nodded. "Good." He quickly cut past Ken down the hall. "Been too long since we played." He quickly entered the first door on the right.

A square table was in the middle of the room, four chairs surrounding it. Seated in the leftmost chair was another longtime friend of his, short burgundy hair and tanned skin with a fairly muscular build.

"Buddy!" Takeru called out, crossing over to the middle of the room. A couple of dart boards hung on the walls and a projector was mounted on the ceiling towards a blank area of the wall. He clapped Daisuke on the shoulder. "You ready to rock?"

"Overdue," Daisuke replied, putting his arms up on the table. Takeru reached into the pocket of his cargo shorts, pulling out his phone, quickly pressing the buttons along the side to power it off. "Please tell me some good news."

Ken came in the room behind Takeru, shutting the door. "Okay, this room's clean. Now, please tell us all about how our overly-intelligent friend came up with another excuse as to why we can't stick our heads out our front doors for another three months."

"You gotta be like that?" Daisuke said, grinning. "I bring myself all the way over here for you to be all negative?"

"You live three floors up," Ken replied. "And I'm just managing expectations."

Takeru glanced around the room. "Kids, we're on. Angelique. Koushiro says it's doable, and might be doable for less than ten thousand units."

"Oh mama," Ken said under his breath. "And this is _Koushiro_ saying this?"

"He thinks we can sneak in there and be making a getaway before anyone even realizes what happened." He pulled one of the chairs out and sat down in it. "He thinks he can hold off the camera feed and the alarm system for a few minutes, and that we can use the vents to distribute some chemicals to eliminate crowd control."

"Oh, we're not going in at night?" Daisuke asked. "Doesn't sound like Koushiro to me."

"Not an option," Takeru replied. "Unless you have access to the latest in level five safe-cracking technology, since that's where all the stuff goes after closing."

"Either three weeks with a plasma laser, or an industrial ore drilling machine," Takeru followed up. "So we do it during the day. We knock out everyone inside beforehand, we get a van decked out like an extermination van so we can go in without anyone thinking anything's up, and then we've got a few minutes to clean up. Shouldn't be any real resistance, we just have to dump the van and it's tough to imagine getting caught."

Daisuke gave a small laugh. "I like that. Tough to imagine getting caught. Nobody's robbed a jewelry store even half the size as Angelique in over ten years, but that's okay, it'll be a breeze."

"Most people don't consider trying it," Ken pointed out. "Most people wouldn't know what to do even if they got away with it." He looked back over at Takeru. "Just us three in there?"

Takeru swallowed down hard. "Iori."

Daisuke's forehead wrinkled. "I...sorry, I just, he's so short, I have a hard time imagining him being useful."

"He's not that short anymore," Ken assured him. "Not...not tall, but it's not like it used to be. But are we sure we know enough about him to bring him in on something like this? Last thing we need is to get blown because we brought someone too soft."

"Koushiro says he's good," Takeru said, giving a couple quick nods. "So...we're going with that."

A short pause between the three friends, everyone thinking.

"And!" Takeru suddenly said. "Koushiro said that, after this, we can actually _really_ start trying to do something that matters."

"Finally!" Daisuke exclaimed. "No more hibernating for years in between taking steps forward, I love it!" He glanced over to his right. "So, what kind of score are we looking at?"

Takeru gritted his teeth. "Well, there are a lot of variables, but Koushiro...he thinks an efficient and optimal haul could be around thirty million."

Ken gave a low whistle. "Thirty million, there we go. Something worth getting out of bed for."

"Now, there's nothing we're waiting for at this point except our own preparation," Takeru continued. "So, let's figure out who is doing what."

OOO

Hikari pulled open the door on her mini-fridge, bending down to grab a clear plastic pitcher filled with water. Stepping gingerly, she went over towards the one chair in the apartment, a cushioned club chair her parents had given her a couple months ago after visiting and finding out that she didn't have any. She sat down heavily, pouring the pitcher into a small basin on the floor.

"Who needs a bathtub?" she muttered to herself quietly. With the basin partially filled, she placed her feet into it, deeply appreciating the sharpness of the coldness that enveloped her feet as she did so. "Oh, there we go."

Another ten hours of quickly walking around, sweating out of every pore, fighting like hell to smile and look cheerful the whole time, forcing herself to remember that the uniform was what was getting her paid four units per hour more than the average waitress. By the time her shift was over, it was as it always was when she got off, her entire body was sore and she was exhausted. Feeling blessed to be able to receive a scooter ride home from Lily, she stuck her uniform in the laundry machines down on the first floor, then came right up to her apartment on the fourth floor. She would have welcomed a collapse into deep sleep immediately, but she forced herself to stay up. It didn't sit well with her to do nothing productive in a day besides work. She didn't want her entire existence to revolve around her job, so long as her job was something she was eager to leave. So, with her lower appendages plunged into a thankfully ice cold bowl of water, she took in a deep breath, then reached down towards the floor to her left to pick up a white binder.

"Alright, Hikari...if your eyelids start drooping, you're getting ice cubes down the back of your tanktop," she said to herself, pulling the binder open. As soon as she did, her door clicked open. Lily swung her head into the room, peering over at her friend.

"Last chance, you sure you're staying in?" she asked, her pink hair back falling down around her face after having them up in pigtails at work. "You're not gonna meet anyone in here."

"I'm already locked in," she replied, pressing her back up against the backrest of the chair, standing up as straight as she could manage. "You have fun. Somehow. How you'd be able to is beyond me."

"See you tomorrow morning," Lily offered, retracting her head back into the hall and closing the door. Hikari gave a long, contented sigh, looking down towards Miko, who had taken up residence right next to her chair.

She was about to try to begin putting her focus on the binder when her phone began to vibrate. With a bit of a grunt, she leaned over to look at the front screen of it down by her thermos of coffee on the floor. Her temptation to get angry at the constant interruptions was tempered quickly, however, on seeing the cause.

She thought for a brief moment, then gave a tiny smile. "Oh, I...how can I resist?" she said to herself, picking up the phone and tapping it. "Holbrook Taxidermy, you snuff em we stuff em, how can I help you?" she said into the speaker.

"Still not getting tired of that one, huh?" came the reply, a male voice that she knew better than any voice in the world outside of hers.

"Nothing to get tired of," Hikari replied. "Alright, brother mine, in the event that you're calling to let off steam about how rough your work day was, just keep in mind that you're gonna have to top a boss who won't let you take off your knee socks without a staff meeting, a birthday party with sixteen nine-year-olds who forgot to call in ahead of time, and a very insistent complaint from a sixty-year-old man that our potato chips are too thin."

"Sixteen nine-year-olds?" Taichi repeated. "Sounds like your idea of heaven."

"Well, context and situation is everything," Hikari replied. "Maybe I would have gotten a kick out of it if I didn't have seven other tables to run around between. Or if half the kids didn't change their order every two minutes."

"Yeah, not gonna try to top that," Taichi said with a laugh. "My day was fine, uh...no, I just wanna see how you're doing."

"Oh, fine, if I don't think too hard about it," Hikari replied, kicking her feet around in the basin of water.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Taichi asked. "If you think hard about it, you're a nineteen-year-old woman who makes a good wage, lives in her own apartment, has her own cat, and has a plan for the future. Come on, we've talked about this, don't you dare get down on yourself."

"Yeah, sounds great, I just...I had another one of those days where I couldn't help but think about how far away I might be from actually...realizing that plan." She bent down and grabbed her coffee mug, sipping from it. "Years. Plural. Not fun to think about."

"You're not even a full adult yet," Taichi reminded her. "You're so far ahead what anyone could reasonably expect, you're doing phenomenally."

She sighed, stretching her back out, arching her stomach forward. "They keep saying that, and then I go to that job six days a week and feel half-dead by the end of my shift and it doesn't _feel_ like I'm doing that phenomenally."

"It's part of the process," Taichi insisted. "Everyone has to spend some time doing something they hate when they first get out of academy."

Hikari rolled her eyes. "Well...not _everyone_."

"Regardless...I'm so proud of you. Everyone is," Taichi said. "And you're going to get a job you like before you know it, because unlike so many people out there, you want it for more than just a paycheck. You have passion for becoming an educator because it means the world to you, and that's going to make all the difference."

"Thank you, Tai," Hikari said. "You, well...you've gotten pretty good at knowing what to say," she admitted.

OOO

Takeru sat on the edge of his bed, rubbing his chin, mouth curled into a small frown. The room was mostly dark, faint sunlines sneaking in around the closed blinds on the large windows on the right wall. He glanced up at the ceiling, tilting his head back as far as he could, then looked back down. He grabbed a small remote off the top of his blanket and tapped it, the light fixture above his head beginning to glow with a gentle, easy light.

A piece of paper on the bed next to him was filled with assorted scribbles of text. He quickly looked it over.

"Van...I mean, what kind?" Takeru muttered. "That's important, vans are different." His eyebrows twitched around as he thought. "Okay, van...uniforms. Do costume stores make exterminator uniforms?" He pursed his lips. "Probably not."

He stood up, clicking the remote again, turning the light back off. He moved across the room, over to a small chair in the corner, absentmindedly grabbing a guitar from it's stand right next to the chair and pulling it into his lap.

"Hmph," he muttered, looking the instrument over, running his hand over the front of the wooden tool. He placed his long fingers along the neck of the instrument, pressing down on assorted strings at various points.

He strummed the strings a couple times with his thumb, producing an obnoxious cacophonic series of sounds that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He pressed his palm on the strings.

"Who came up with this thing anyway?" he grumbled. Sitting back in the chair, he sighed.


	3. Converging Lines

Chapter Two: Converging Lines

"There's definitely a price difference between the gold bands and platinum bands, usually around...fifteen to twenty percent more for the platinum. So if it makes no difference to you, then, well…"

Takeru nodded, giving a thin smile. "Oh, this woman, she's...she's not the kind of woman who turns her nose up at a gift because it's not perfect. Particularly something like this."

Angelique was a jewelry store of particular reverence. Everything about the place was a bold statement, and to even so much as enter the building was a bold statement by the consumer. On entering the front door, you would find yourself in a small room, with the entrance to the actual store being locked, with only a visual inspection from an employee allowing you to actually enter. If you didn't look like the right kind of customer, you weren't getting in. Takeru had busted out his best sport jacket in order to pass this test. Once inside, there was just one large room, held up by marble, white pillars, with rows of tables with glass surfaces protecting jewelry of all kinds. In the corners closest to the entrance, earrings and cufflinks hung from the walls, and as you moved back, the prizes got bigger and more expensive.

"Then I think we can find something that'll work well for you for less than four thousand," the saleswoman replied. "Gold band."

As Takeru gave a noncommittal nod, he continued to look around, sweeping his head around slowly back and forth. "Just for the sake of variety, uh...tell me about your necklaces too."

"Oh, alright then, just follow me," she indicated, sweeping him towards the back right corner. "We've got hundreds to choose from, in the same price range as the rings for the most part."

OOO

"The second door could be at least a little bit of a pain," Takeru said quietly, glancing around the dark, gray parking garage from behind the windshield of the two-year-old, black, ragtop convertible. "You can get through the first door no problem, but the second door locks. They have to let people in."

Koushiro nodded. "Yeah, I knew about that. I figure I'll be suppressing the alarm anyway, and we're going to be breaking a lot of glass as it is, so just smash it."

"Definitely something that someone outside could see or hear," Takeru pointed out.

"Yeah, it's not perfect," Koushiro admitted. "But that lock isn't something I can hack. Just park the van right in front of the entrance, the odds are pretty small. Play some music or something, cover it up."

"Did you get everything else you needed?" Takeru asked. "You saw the alarm box on the wall?"

"Yeah, that's still the same, that's fine," Koushiro said. "They changed the layout of the store, though. They moved some of the stuff, those shelves in the back are set up differently. I'll have to consider optimal routes."

Takeru snorted. "Optimal routes, that...might be a little micro-manage-y."

"You're gonna have limited time in there, I'd like to squeeze every unit out of this," Koushiro said. "Who knows when we'll have another opportunity to have a score this size. I'd like to maximize."

"Still feeling good about that thirty million number?" Takeru asked, watching a white van slowly putter through the parking lot right in front of Takeru's car.

Koushiro nodded. "If the grab is efficient. They've got so much of their stuff out for display, trying to show off. I counted about four million units in rings alone."

"I wanna do this as soon as possible," Takeru said, reaching up to tap his steering wheel a few times. "Sick of reading the news and getting irritated at everything. I'm sure everyone else is too."

"Let's take a ride," Koushiro suggested. "See how everyone else is shaking up."

Takeru reached forward to start the car, humming the engine to life with the press of a button. "You hear about the photo traffic lights? Doubling them by the end of the year. Gonna be about two hundred of them in this city alone."

Koushiro grimaced. "Not as bad as the drones," he replied. "Imagine walking down the street and being...completely okay with a hovering camera just following you from twenty feet in the air? That's what they're asking people to do."

"Speaking of drones," Takeru said. "Is the delivery system for Iori's stuff a go?"

Koushiro nodded. "No problem. Perfect little single engine with a cargo drop that's just the right size, only eighteen hundred units."

"As soon as that thing gets fifteen feet off the ground, air traffic is gonna pick it up," Takeru pointed out.

"Obviously I know that much," Koushiro said, a touch of disdain at the implication that he wasn't already fully aware of how difficult it was to do anything without someone knowing about it within seconds. "I filed off the identification and scrambled the signature on it. Air traffic will give it about two minutes before they commandeer it, by which time I'll have dropped the cargo and self-destructed the drone."

Takeru nodded, pulling the car out of the parking stall. "Sounds good. Just...after this is over. If we pull this off. I'm ready to go. I mean, let's be smart about it, naturally, but I'm ready to go."

"After this we'll be able to," Koushiro assured him. "I already have plans, but...too early to talk about it."

OOO

Hikari pressed her back against the wall behind her bed, using it to prop her up into a sitting position. She squinted down at a notepad in her right hand, considering a series of words and numbers that she had scribbled onto it.

"Hm," she grumbled. "Miko, do me a favor and just start scratching me next time I try to do this," she said, pointing her left hand's index finger at the notepad. "Like, scratch me hard. I want blood." She tossed the notepad over towards the far corner of the bed. "Wastes time, depresses me, and I know how the numbers are gonna come up."

She looked over at the small white feline, perched in the middle of the bed, just in front of Hikari's feet.

"This is partially your fault, you know," Hikari muttered, a self-conscious smirk growing on her face. "You're costing me a hundred units a month."

Miko just sat there, staring at her owner, entirely unaware of what she was saying to her, blissfully ignorant of Hikari's concerns in life.

"Maybe you need to get a job," Hikari said. "I don't see you earning your keep." She looked around the small apartment. "Then again, I guess I haven't seen any mice here. Yet."

Miko gave a purr, going down into a prone position, stretching out on the top of the bed.

"Ah, well...it's not your fault," Hikari lamented, crossing her arms over her chest. "I should be mad at Bill 48-G...hard to get mad at a bill, though."

Her door suddenly popped open, drawing her gaze. Lily popped into the room, practically skating in with an enthusiastic energy.

"Oh, right, I need to get the knocker on my door fixed," Hikari said dryly.

"Oh, you're never doing anything you want to keep private from me," Lily said dismissively.

Hikari pursed her lips for a moment, eyes glancing up towards the ceiling. "I can think of a _couple_ things I could be doing," she muttered.

"But you're never doing those things," Lily insisted. "Something that we should work to rectify, starting with today."

"Hey, I could still be…" Hikari trailed off, eyes sliding down towards the floor as Lily approached her bed, looking down at her feet. "Did...did you take the elevator barefoot?"

Lily looked down at her feet. "Oh. I guess I did," she admitted, shifting her weight slightly and picking one of her feet up.

"Well, don't do that," Hikari admonished. "It makes it look like you just escaped from the mental hospital and ran in here to hide."

Lily thought for a moment. "I mean...I would have had to escape from the mental hospital, run twenty-one blocks barefoot in ninety-seven degree weather across mostly sizzling concrete, then just so happen to run into this particular apartment complex, so…"

"You'd be a mental patient," Hikari reminded her. "You'd be insane, so there's no rhyme or reason to anything you do. Maybe you stole a car."

"Okay, forget...all of that. You haven't forgotten, have you?" Lily sat down at the foot of the bed, beckoning to Miko, who ignored her and rolled over onto her back.

"No, I haven't, of course not," Hikari replied, rubbing her forehead. "Just been getting myself in the right mood by reminding myself of my hopeless finances."

Lily rolled her eyes. "Hopeless finances. You're a good four loans from shady lending companies away from being hopeless. Hell, you're caught up on all your bills, you're keeping a good pace on your student loans, where's the hopelessness?"

"The same place where everything that comes in goes back out," Hikari pouted. "I was expecting sixty hour work weeks to give me a nice cushion, not just prevent me from starving to death."

"Beats _actually_ starving to death," Lily pointed out. "Look, I've read forum threads online, this...this is pretty standard. And I think we both know the best way to make the money concerns go away, which leads me back to tonight."

"Very romantic," Hikari said, a touch of bitterness in her voice. "Hook up with the first half-decent, semi-sane man you find, and do it before your feet both just turn into giant permanent blisters from spending half your life running between tables."

"You don't have to be crazy about the guy, we're not talking about marriage here!" Lily insisted. "Not yet, anyway, but...if you don't mind being around him, then a steady relationship takes a lot of the financial burden off."

"I...I just feel like...people are supposed to get together for better reasons than that," Hikari said, reaching down and stroking Miko's belly with her foot.

"Well, either way, maybe this guy will surprise you," Lily offered. "Remember, a computer algorithm matched you two together. A computer algorithm. Counts for something."

Hikari fought not to roll her eyes. "Yeah, we'll see...I just hope I'm not gonna end up using part of my day off on a dead end."

"Hey, whatever happens, we'll both go get foot massages after," Lily said. "Not a complete waste no matter what."

Hikari slid herself off the side of the bed, stretching her arms up above her head. "Alright. I'll...I'll try to give him the best of me."

OOO

Daisuke grabbed the tip of the wide strip of tape that he had just adhered to the side of the van. Slowly and deliberately, he began to peel it away from the van, a soft sizzle sounding off as the adhesive was broken. The tape revealed a wide red stripe along the side of the yellow van. In the middle of the red stripe, right on the side door, an oval-shaped logo came from behind the tape. The oval had a red line strike through the middle of it, forming the traditional no symbol, with a brown cockroach in the middle of it.

"Kind of cliche, don't you think?" Takeru said, rubbing his chin with his fingers as Daisuke pulled the last of the tape from the vehicle.

"Cliche is good," Koushiro said, looking the logo over as Daisuke began pulling a square piece of tape just below the red stripe away from the van. "Unmemorable, looks like it could belong to any exterminator company in the world. That's a positive thing. Generic, something people forget as soon as the van is out of sight."

The second large strip of tape pulled away to reveal the words "Pro Exterminators" in a bright green color.

"Speaking of generic," Takeru said. "That's a really good name."

"Looks great," Koushiro said, walking around the van slowly. "Just the kind of thing that convinces people it's real and doesn't raise any questions."

"It'll be dry and ready for operation tonight," Daisuke said, dropping the scraps of tape to the floor of the garage. "I've got a good feel for it. Though, if this works, we're not going to need any overly fancy driving, are we?"

"I'd prefer driving as unfancy as possible," Koushiro said. "If someone's actually chasing you, then something's wrong."

"Although, I'd like to point out, not impossible, so make sure the tank is full," Takeru added, smacking Daisuke on the shoulder. "You've been saying you want a challenge, try outrunning the police in a van with thirty million units in jewelry, you'd be an instant legend."

"I said a challenge, I didn't say I want to die," Daisuke replied. "No, seriously, please make sure you're in the van _well_ before the alarm goes off, I've never wanted to avoid danger more in my life."

"Hey, what's this kind of talk?" Takeru goaded. "Don't act like you don't dream about racing down a freeway, pedal squeezed to the floor, with three dozen squad cars on your tail."

"Yeah, in a racing car, not a van," Daisuke pointed out.

"Well, I should be able to suppress the alarm for as long as we need to," Koushiro said. "So the only problem would be if someone physically sees you. Other than that...I think we can get a good fifteen minutes before the independent security thinks to call in and check."

"Alright, I think we've seen everything we need to see," Takeru said, clapping his hands together a few times. "Daisuke's ready for action."

Koushiro nodded. "I agree, well done sir. Let's go pay Ken a visit, because I'm starting to get the sense that tomorrow afternoon will be as good a time as any to go for it."

OOO

Hikari shrunk a little bit to her left as a fast-moving waiter burst past her. Of course, she was in no actual danger of being in his way, from her spot in the chair right up by the edge of the small circular table against the left wall of the restaurant, but she felt the urge to over-react a bit just to do _something._

"Ah, you know how it is."

Hikari blinked a few times, then focused her gaze across the small table again. "Uh, well, not really, actually. I don't even have a computer right now, so I'm probably out of practice. Tell me about it."

Steve was _fine_ , she supposed. As in, there wasn't anything wrong with him. She couldn't shake the feeling that the supposed 'computer algorithm' that had paired them was probably just slapping them together on account of both of them leading extremely boring lives and hailing from the same social class, but initial impressions weren't all that bad.

"Oh, you don't have a computer, wow," Steve replied, glancing down towards the ground. "I couldn't even imagine that, been on those since I was four years old."

"Yeah, well...it was either a laptop or a cat, and...well, I like cats and didn't like the idea of coming home to an empty apartment every night," Hikari replied. "And I have my phone, so it's not like I'm completely out of the loop."

"Well, it's...patient reports get filled out by the doctors, and then they get sent to me. And, obviously, we don't want to just have the reports in filing cabinets so we have to flip through them every time we need to look something up, so I input the data from the reports into the computer."

"So...data entry?" Hikari said.

"Right. And then I make sure the reports are backed up on backup servers, we have two backups, and then I make sure the paper gets recycled," Steve said. "That's about it. Just copying reports over."

Hikari nodded. "That's...that's cool, then."

"Stable," he added. "There are always going to be people visiting doctors, so there's always going to be reports that need to be copied."

Hikari almost started talking about the possibility of the doctors eventually just filling out reports directly into a computer, but didn't quite have the heart to suggest it. He just seemed so proud of himself.

"Other than that...I have a pet goldfish right now, so...I mean, that's a commitment." He shrugged. "You know, my parents told me, not right now, but...I went for it. And he's still going strong after two months, so...pretty good, y'know?"

"One goldfish?" Hikari asked. "Like, just one?"

"Yeah, I…I didn't want to get too crazy," Steve replied. "He seems really happy, too." Suddenly, his face brightened. "Oh yeah! There's another thing going on with...with my job."

Hikari's eyes widened a bit, her focus going back up to her date. "Oh, really? Go ahead then!"

"Well, most days I work faster than the reports come in, so...I have a lot of free time, so...I take a big water gun in with me, and I've been working on making it shoot out a stronger stream of water, and...you have to see this thing, I've made it like three times stronger. It's almost an actual weapon at this point."

Hikari managed to force a smile and a nod. "Oh. Well, that's...that sounds like fun."

A waiter stopped by their table and began unloading the contents of a tray onto the table. A thick yellow soup with large chunks of ham and white beans in it was set down in front of Hikari, and Steve received a french dip.

"Thank you," Steve said quickly to the waiter as the food was placed in front of him. "You know, Hikari, I think...we make a lot of sense together." He nodded knowingly a few times. "I mean, things really make sense, if you want my opinion, so...you know, that's how I feel about things."

Hikari grimaced to herself, brow furrowing slightly.

OOO

"He said we made sense together," Hikari said, putting her left elbow up on the chair's armrest and leaning over slightly towards her friend. "That's what he said. The conclusion he came to before we had even started eating on our first date."

The two young adult women were sitting back on reclined chairs, their feet up on a cushioned bar. Each one had a woman in a white uniform sitting down by their feet, using rubber-gloved hands to briskly rub their feet. They worked quickly, alternating between long strokes and deep presses.

"Well, maybe that means he's assertive," Lily suggested. "He talks with you for ten minutes, and he just feels it, and he decides he wants to say something so you understand it."

"The problem is, I suspect he's right," Hikari added. "Like, I think I get why he says that. We make sense together, we're both exceedingly dull people who can share generic boring lives where we go work low-tier jobs all day and then come home with just enough energy to collapse together in bed, willing to stay together because two incomes are better than one." She rolled her eyes. "So yeah, the bad part is I actually see why he'd say that."

"So...you're in?" Lily asked, turning to face her friend.

"Lily, I'm...I'm trying to angst about the inevitability of it all! Angst with me!" Hikari complained, a self-aware smirk on her lips nonetheless. "I mean...he's fine I guess. You know, I wouldn't hate seeing him again, but…"

"Hikari, don't think about things too hard!" Lily pleaded. "I just...I think you'd be happier. It's a tough world out there, and...obviously, you have me, I'm your friend. You have Ashley and Ren too, you have your brother and parents, but...you could use another ally. An ally who can actually help make your life easier. And this guy could do that."

Hikari sighed. "Yeah. An ally." She nodded grimly. "I just wish I was fighting for something a little more significant." She sank down into the chair a little bit, trying to at least soak up all the possible enjoyment from the foot massage. It was the one period of pure enjoyment and relaxation she felt she got the entire week, outside of perhaps sleeping, and she'd prefer not to waste any of it.

"But you'll be seeing him again?" Lily asked.

"I suppose so. He didn't smell awful or...ask for a lock of my hair or anything, so there's no obvious dealbreaker." Hikari nodded. "Can't hurt."

"Maybe tomorrow you'll get in the mood after we hang out with Ren," Lily offered. "Remember, we both promised, after work. We're getting there early, getting off early, going to see her."

"Hm," Hikari grunted quietly, but nodding. "Sure, but...I don't see how going to look at jewelry is going to get me in any kind of mood."

"Well, you're gonna get in there, you'll be looking around, Ren'll be trying stuff on, asking questions about the rings, and you're gonna start feeling it. Trust me, the envy kicks in, and you'll be thinking to yourself, what do I have to do to get a guy to buy me one of these things?"

Hikari's brow furrowed. "You...you do understand that I just had my _first_ date, right?" She blinked a few times. "First date. Rings, we're so far away from that, it basically doesn't even exist in this dimension."

"I know, I know, but...just, trust me, you'll get inside Angelique and Ren'll be talking about wedding plans and how excited she is to spend the rest of her life with Aaron, and it'll spark something." Lily nodded sagely. "Trust me."

"I don't really care about jewelry," Hikari pointed out.

"You say that now, but...when the day comes that a man is planning on spending two months' salary on a ring to give to you, you'll feel differently," Lily insisted.

Hikari nodded. "Well, I...I'll be there tomorrow," she said. "It'll be fun, although...I don't see how I'm going to help Ren figure out what she wants."

"Oh, she just wants to have some friends to subtly brag to about getting married," Lily whispered. "Just indulge her, she'll be there for us when it's our turn."

Hikari nodded. "Makes sense."

OOO

The glass box, about the size of a shoebox, sat on the edge of the table, transparent and empty. Takeru bent down a bit, staring at it intently.

"Okay, Iori, show us what you got," Koushiro said, similarly staring down at the glass box.

The box had a thin white tube leading into it, the other end of which trailed over towards a nozzle that was attached to a sealed plastic bag. Iori twisted a tiny dial on the nozzle, then gently began to press against the bag, deflating it and pushing its contents over into the glass box.

Takeru noticed nothing. But a quick glance upwards, towards an electronic device with a series of numerical displays began to drastically change, with the numbers being displayed rapidly scaling upwards. Takeru didn't bother reading the specific things being counted or the precise numerical changes, only noting that there was a significant change after the contents of the bag had been allowed inside the box.

"Well, I sure as hell don't see anything in here, so...I guess the gas is nice and invisible," Takeru said. "Now, I don't really remember chemistry class, and don't care to be refreshed, so…"

Koushiro cleared his throat from over Takeru's shoulder. "Well, that box in the top left of the digital reader measures—"

"I was very clear on this, I don't care to be refreshed," Takeru interrupted.

Koushiro sighed. "It's good news. If your head was inside that box, you would be falling asleep right now."

"If his head was inside that box, he'd have much bigger problems," Iori pointed out, watching the reader next to the box continue to hold with high readings.

Iori had gutted the second bedroom of his apartment and turned it into an impressive chemistry lab. It looked as you might expect a chemistry laboratory to look, with dozens of glass beakers and thin tubing threaded through various clear containers. Colored bottles and gauges filled in whatever gaps there were in tablespace between these various items.

"And we're _sure_ that's what it does?" Takeru asked. "Have you tested this stuff on somebody?"

"You're looking at the test subject," Iori replied proudly. "I've used it every night the last week to get to sleep faster."

"You don't value your life very much, do you?" Koushiro asked absentmindedly, still watching the readings from the glass box.

"No, I value it plenty," Iori protested. "I just so happen to believe in my abilities. And my belief was justified, the chemical works exactly as anticipated _and_ has no negative side effects after it wears off."

"That you know of," Takeru pointed out. "I mean, it's been a week, there's no way to know for sure that you...I dunno, don't have a tiny little tumor developing in your brain. Or that your sperm count isn't dropping like a rock—"

"Hey, if you want to deal with crowd control at Angelique, you don't have to use it," Iori said testily. "Anyway, the readings will go back to normal in about four minutes. At that point, there's no trace of any sort of chemicals in the air, so by the time the police lab coats get a shot at it there won't be anything left. I figure, we use a generic container for the dispersion, there's nothing left to analyze. Of course, anyone who's already gotten some of the gas in their lungs will still be out for a good hour, unless someone really tries to force them to wake up."

Koushiro nodded. "Mind if I stick around and keep an eye on the readings? I trust you, I just wanna see this."

"Oh, all yours," Iori said. "I mean, I'm going in there with you guys too, I need this stuff to work just as much as you guys."

"I say we go tomorrow," Koushiro added. "Why wait? It can't possibly get easier, and it could get harder. Ken got the equipment, so there's nothing holding us back. It's not like the layout of the store is complicated or anything."

Takeru nodded. "Tomorrow." He nodded. "Why not? Sure. Afternoon?"

"Before people get off work," Koushiro agreed. "Afternoons before people get off work, that's the slow time. Should only be a few people in there, minimal chance of problems occurring. And if everything goes well, nobody should even have to touch a gun. If we get really lucky, we could just take the van to the crusher instead of torching it, _really_ cover our tracks."

"I'll prepare to torch it anyway," Takeru said.

Slowly, the readings on the interior of the glass box began to drop back to the levels they had been before Iori pushed the gas into it, the needles and digits dancing downward. Koushiro reached out his hand towards Iori, who slapped at Koushiro's palm.

"Very nice work," Koushiro marveled. "Tomorrow."

Takeru gave another nod of approval. "Tomorrow."


	4. Spotting the Thread

Chapter Three: Spotting the Thread

Hikari kept looking down and adjusting her red cardigan. Tugging at the sleeves and the collar. She couldn't stop thinking about how she had seemed to just _barely_ make the cut at the front door.

In reality, she had no way of actually knowing anything, she basically never visited jewelry stores, and didn't actually know how things worked in typical cases. She just felt like they had examined her for quite a long time, debating the qualifications of someone wearing a cardigan and pencil skirt that had been sixty percent off during a clearance sale last year, and strappy sandals that were a graduation gift from her mother. Was this young woman who worked as a waitress and had less than nine hundred units in her bank account worth the space inside here?

Okay, it was pure paranoia to think that they actually knew that, but she could feel the assumption being made. She looked like a typical young woman, and typical young women weren't the key demographic in fancy jewelry stores. But they had let her in, and nobody had said anything, so it could easily have all been in her head.

"Oh, put that down," Lily scolded, snapping Hikari back into the present. "You waste your time with something like that, you'll feel disappointed by everything else."

Ren was holding a bracelet with lines of diamonds running across the surface, nearly blinding all witnesses with it's reflective powers. "It's pretty cool though, isn't it?"

"Oh, sure, it's cool. But unless you're secretly the heir to the throne of some small country over in Eatarous and have just been holding out on us, it'll look absurd," Lily said as Ren put the bracelet back on the small cushioned platform that supported and displayed it.

"And unless Aaron's got an uncle on the board at Safelock Bank & Trust or Globtronics, it'll have to be on a two hundred year payment plan," Hikari added, bending down a bit and eyes widening at the price tag just beneath the bracelet.

"Okay, okay," Ren relented, beginning a slow stroll towards one of the corners of the large store, her friends following. "You guys...you don't think it's lame that Aaron needs me to tell him what I want?"

Hikari shrugged. "If I were in your position, I'd just be hung up on him insisting on getting you a real ring."

"It's tradition," Ren said. "That's what he says, anyway. Says it wouldn't be a real marriage if he doesn't get a real diamond ring."

Hikari watched blankly as Ren bent down over a row of rings out on display pillows on a table close to the corner of the store. "Not a real marriage unless he earmarks three hundred units a month for the next year on payments, right when he's trying to start a family."

"Hikari, don't talk about the money!" Lily hissed. "You'll destroy the...the beauty of the moment," she added as Ren examined a gold ring with a square blue gem on it.

Hikari looked over the table, trying to take in all the different elements at play on it. Dozens of finely crafted and beautifully designed pieces of finger jewelry, which took the finest jewelers in the world hours of painstaking crafting. Big, strong men with big, loud pieces of equipment drilled for years to open up the caves that the precious gems and metals were found inside, hard labor that was highly valued. The table's contents alone were probably somewhere around six figures. More than a hundred times what she took home in a week. If any one of the display items were to accidentally catch on the zipper of her cardigan and nobody noticed when she left, her net worth would immediately double.

I mean, that was pretty cool, when you thought about it like that. But she kept coming back to the fact that these rings didn't do anything but simply _exist._ You put it on, and it was there, and it remained there until you took it off. It didn't make you stronger or faster or more attractive or give you some sort of special powers...it simply was. And that just wasn't quite holding her attention. She didn't think she was just telling herself that to suppress some form of jealousy that Ren's fiancee was getting her one and she was a long way off from potentially getting one. It just wasn't doing much in terms of motivating her to accelerate that long way off.

"So, was I right?"

Hikari again had to jolt back into reality, having gotten lost in opposing trains of thought. Ren had a silver river with three small diamond studs on her right hand's ring finger, looking it over, absorbed in judging how it looked on her hand. Lily stood at Hikari's side.

"Come on, you're starting to feel the itch, aren't you?" Lily continued.

"Oh...you have no idea," Hikari said dryly. "How many rings has she tried on?" She asked in a low whisper, putting her lips right by Lily's left ear.

"Like seven now," Lily answered quickly, before really considering the question. "W-wait...you've been standing there the whole time."

Hikari squeezed her eyes shut. She had to stop zoning out like that.

"So, Hikari, I want as many takes as possible...what's the right look for me?" Ren asked.

"O-Oh, well...well, I'm a ruby girl, you know me, red's my jam," she said quickly. "So yeah, I'm on that side." She quickly stepped away from Lily, swinging her head around to find the restroom. "I'll be right back," she murmured after finding the sign hanging from the ceiling in the back right corner.

She quickly moved towards the sign, thinking about how if Lily wanted to motivate her to want to settle down with a man, she'd have far more luck taking her to a baby gear store.

OOO

Takeru looked down at the display screen in his right hand, watching it spark to life and show him a view of a large green dumpster.

"You think they ever accidentally chuck a gem or something in there?" Daisuke asked. "Got hundreds of pieces laying around, something just falls into a trash can, ends up back there? If I was a dumpster diver it's the first place I'd look."

"I'm not really the kind of person who ever considers what I might do if I was a dumpster diver," Ken replied, craning his head up from the back seat of the van to watch the screen. The camera began to move upwards, depicting a stone grey building behind the dumpster.

"Well Daisuke, while we're working inside, why don't you run out back and swim through the dumpster real quick to see if there's anything?" Iori suggested.

"Hey, watch it, buddy," Daisuke said, looking in the rearview mirror of the van. "We're giving you the biggest chance of your life, and there could be more action down the road, last thing you want to do is get on my bad side," he warned.

"Oh my GOD, is that really how you talk now?" Iori said, laughing a bit. "Please tell me you rehearsed that in the mirror for five hours last night, I won't be able to bear being around you anymore if that's the new you."

"Alright, air traffic's probably picked it up by now," Takeru announced as the camera quickly ascended, up above the building that it was looking at, coming to look over a concrete roof. A trap door was in the back right corner and some metal pipes trailed around. Several of the pipes were connected to a large aluminum cube more than a meter tall with a partially open top.

"I could be controlling this drone with my feet and still get this done before air traffic actually does anything about it, see?" Koushiro's voice came in through small earpieces that everyone in the car was wearing. "Nothing to it."

The camera closed in on the cube, coming to hover above the open top. Suddenly, the picture flickered out and was replaced by one pointing down into the aluminum, showing the inside of the piping that went down into the building.

"A nice ninety-two degrees out, air conditioning is on full blast," Koushiro muttered. A round object suddenly dropped from the drone, down into the piping inside the cube. As soon as the object was clearly inside the pipes, the drone sped off, roads and the roofs of buildings and structures whizzing by.

"Okay, I'm gonna go self-destruct this baby four blocks to the west, might even cause a small distraction to help us out," Koushiro said. Daisuke began to drive the van forward. "Should be about thirty seconds before that gas has everybody in there on the floor, so we're a go. I've got the alarms suppressed and the cameras on a loop."

The van pulled out into the street, only needing to go half a block before coming up on the entrance to the store. Glass double doors leading to a buffer room between the outside world and the interior. Daisuke got as close to the curb as he could, parking the large, back half of the van so it was covering as much of the doors as possible.

Meanwhile, Takeru, Ken, and Iori all put on black gas masks with heavily tinted eye windows. Takeru groaned at the thought of wearing such a thing, combined with the grey jumpsuit, in this kind of heat, but it was too late to complain. He jumped out of the passenger side door, with the sliding doors being pushed open by Ken by the back seats.

Takeru came around the van just in time to see a couple customers collapse to the carpeted floor just inside the front doors. Thankfully, nobody had been inside the entry room.

"Nice work," Takeru muttered to Iori as the three quickly marched up to the door. Ken tossed an empty black gym bag over to Takeru, holding an identical back in his other hand. Iori had one as well.

As Takeru pulled open the door, black gloves on his hands covering any trace he might leave, Daisuke began to play some music from the van's speaker system. An impressive bass beat burst from the large vehicle, not enough to draw attention but enough to make everyone in the area aware of it. Takeru slapped up a small paper sign that said CLOSED in bright orange lettering against the outmost door, for whatever tiny percentage it might help them should someone walk by.

Ken pulled a metal rod less than foot long from his front pocket and pressed the top of it up against the interior door. Takeru turned towards the van, watching Daisuke in the driver's seat. After a brief moment, Daisuke pointed at Takeru. Takeru pointed back at Daisuke. "Do it," Takeru said firmly, voice muffled by the mask.

Takeru winced as a small bolt shot out of the rod's tip and penetrated through the sheet of glass, shattering it with a non-trivial burst of noise that pierced everyone's ears. As Ken had done this, Daisuke had quickly cranked the volume up on the music, a sudden climb in decibels to disguise the shattering glass. Within two seconds, he had taken it back down to the previous, normal level. Maybe people walking or driving in the area had noticed the sudden volume increase, but it had gone away so fast, all would assume it was nothing more than a finger slipping on the dial. And the destroyed door would pass unnoticed by anyone who wasn't specifically listening for it. And why would anyone be?

Takeru took a half second to look around the large store. All he cared about were the people, and the only people he could see were laying flat on the floor. Iori's mixture had worked seemingly to perfection, and there was now nothing between the three and the thousands of pieces of jewelry lining shelves and tables.

"Alright kids," Koushiro said as the three dashed into the store, Takeru going right for the right side wall. He pulled an empty gym bag from the inside of the first bag, shaking it out to open it, and began to pull necklaces off of the wall and tossing them into the bag. "I'm watching the channels, so just focus on the grab."

OOO

Hikari pushed the silver handle on the sink down, turning the flow of water off. She looked at herself in the mirror for a few seconds, steeling herself to force some excitement for Ren's sake. This was for her, and this was a fairly significant moment in her life, and she wanted to be a part of it.

"Alright, come on, jewelry's still pretty," she muttered to herself. She winced, nose wrinkling, as she suddenly felt an onset of mild nausea come on. She furrowed her brow and glanced around the empty bathroom.

"Alright, five minutes in a public bathroom is four minutes too long, come on," Hikari said, her voice echoing off the walls. She hiked her purse up underneath her arm and went over to the door, pushing it open slowly.

At first, everything seemed normal, but her mental alarm went up on seeing that the far wall had been stripped of brooches and earrings, bare where once there had been riches. She took one step out of the bathroom and glanced around the room, taking a second to find a surprising lack of people, two people laying on the floor a few meters in front of her, and two individuals in jumpsuits and gas masks, carrying black gym bags.

One of them was standing maybe four steps in front of her, right next to a shelf that towered up to the ceiling, staring right at her, expression and reaction unreadable thanks to the mask. She needed only a second to process that and react accordingly with a piercing scream and a jump back that rammed her body right into the bathroom door.

The man in front of her pulled on a velcro strap on his waist and, just before she turned to try hiding in the bathroom, she saw him whip out a silver pistol from a pocket behind it. Immediately, her interest in fleeing left her, and her hands rocketed up at her sides, going high in the air above her head, hoping that doing so without being prompted would earn her some bonus points.

She vaguely acknowledged a third mask-wearing individual pop his head up from behind a row of counters across the store, for the tiny iota that it mattered to her right now, and then squeezed her eyes shut in fear.

OOO

"And we were doing so well," Iori muttered, as the young woman surrendered immediately and without consideration of any other possibility.

"Somebody's awake?!" Koushiro snapped through the earpieces. "Just one?! Who?! What's going on?!"

"Teenage...teenage girl," Takeru said, keeping his pistol trained on her. For a moment, he was self-conscious of his appearance, having to remind himself that his outfit, mask, and the distortion of his voice from the mask hid everything from this woman. "Don't worry, it's fine, I got her."

"Are there others?" Koushiro asked. "Is she the only one?! Are you sure?!"

"Slow down," Takeru replied. "You two keep going, I'll handle the crowd control." He took a couple steps towards the girl, who had her eyes shut tightly. "You're not here to cause trouble for us?"

She popped one eye open, looking over at Takeru, before quickly realizing that nodding was the right thing to do.

"Then this'll be very easy." He pointed down at a thick wooden table leg attached to a table a few steps away. "Just sit down on the floor right there, back against the table leg, and put your arms out behind you."

The three of them had known there was a possibility of some stragglers and had prepared accordingly. Takeru was grateful that this particular straggler was a small teenage woman who had no interest in being a hero. All in all it was a very minor setback, as she quickly complied with his request and sat down on the carpet, setting her purse down next to her.

"She was in the bathroom," Ken muttered as he and Iori resumed plucking tiaras from a display shelf.

"Oh, shit!" Koushiro hissed. "Must have been the fan in there, I...I didn't think about that!" Takeru heard a sound that was either Koushiro smacking himself or him smacking his face against a hard surface. "The fan, it...it must have sucked the gas out of the room before it could affect people inside the bathroom!"

"Hey, there are like fifteen people total in here, horrid luck that someone was in there right when we started," Ken pointed out as he filled his bag.

"The gas will have thinned out by now," Iori added. "Light nausea at most for her."

"Okay, stop...stop talking about it," Koushiro ordered. "We'll discuss later."

Takeru kneeled down behind the girl, who seemingly had no interest in trying something, even as Takeru made himself somewhat vulnerable. He reached down into a pouch in his jumpsuit and pulled out a pair of steel handcuffs.

"We'll be out of here in about five minutes," Takeru said to her, voice even and commanding as he clipped the cuffs on her thin wrists. He pulled both sides of it tight so they wouldn't slip over her small hands. "Cops'll be here in fifteen or so. Just sit here, be quiet, and wait for them to come get you."

She was shaking, and her eyes were as wide as a full moon, and Takeru found himself wishing he could actually make her feel better given he had no desire to harm her and she was simply a very unlucky individual at the wrong place at the wrong time, but there wasn't time for that. With her arms secured around the table leg, she drew her legs up close to her, knees up near her chin.

"Purse is yours," she squeaked out, voice tinny and cracking, as she quickly jerked her head down towards her white bag. Takeru gave a small laugh. Why did people always say that? Was he expecting too much rational thought from people who were afraid of being murdered? Maybe.

"Don't worry, we're not here for your money..." Takeru told her, reaching down into the pouch and pulling out a black strip of cloth.

OOO

"...just maybe don't say too much to the police. They won't be able to do anything with it anyway."

She couldn't stop herself. Her entire body shuddered and she turned her head to stare straight at the thief, forehead wrinkling. She had been too terrified to even glance at him ever since she had come out of the bathroom, feeling like the less she looked at him the less she would know about him, and the less he would feel like killing her was a necessity. She still was terrified. But for a brief moment, that took a backseat as she stared in shock and confusion at the burglar.

Her mind raced to make connections, interrupted when a black strip of cloth was placed over her eyes and tied behind her head, robbing her of sight. This gave her just enough time to realize that opening her mouth to say _anything_ would be the worst idea in the history of bad ideas, so she kept her lips sealed.

"I'm putting the handcuff keys on the table behind you," he told her. Thankfully, he must have missed her reaction to his line, or at least didn't particularly care. Which might have meant that it didn't mean anything to him. Or that he didn't realize it's significance. And maybe it wasn't significant to him. But it certainly was to her.

As she shifted around on the floor, thankful for the years of gymnastics that allowed her to keep her arms behind her like this for long periods without any soreness, she thought it over. She heard the thief say "bathrooms are clear" and continued to hear the sounds of jewelry being taken off of shelves and placed into bags, but there was little point in paying much attention.

She had relived that day...or really, that fifteen minute span, a hundred thousand times over four years. She felt entitled to curse her luck at least that many times, that she would take off running in a random direction and just so happen to end up right next to their getaway car five blocks away. Then she would remember that, other than the extreme fear of death she felt, nothing actually happened and that there was an argument that she should actually feel very lucky. So if there was a memory of her life that she had full confidence in completely recalling, it would be that one. Particularly that thirty seconds she had spent in the company of the criminals.

It was a fairly simple and generic statement, she supposed. Any criminal who was leaving behind living witnesses would probably say something like that.

But...those exact words, in that exact order?

Don't worry, we're not here for your money. Just maybe don't say too much to the police. They won't be able to do anything with it anyway.

That's what it had been that day, four years ago. And now, today, it was that again. She was sure of it. And it was just a little too much of a stretch for her to consider that pure coincidence.

She was so wrapped up in that revelation, that she forgot to be afraid for her life. At some point, the three individuals had finished up and left Angelique, as Hikari could no longer hear them running around. She relaxed a bit, stretching her legs out in front of her, and allowed herself to be concerned for Lily and Ren. But first and foremost in her mind, she was planning on giving quite a witness testimony to the police as soon as they found her.

OOO

"Six gym bags full of Angelique's finest," Ken said proudly, turning around to look at the cargo. "Nowadays people would consider you crazy to try to take so much as a handful."

"You're talking as if it's a done deal," Koushiro chirped in through the earpieces. "Which just makes you sound more stupid if things go bad here, please don't. If we all go to jail, I'd prefer to at least not sound stupid."

"It basically went perfect," Daisuke said from the driver's seat. "If we don't get away with _this_ , then there's no justice in the universe. A heist that perfect deserves a clean getaway."

"Perfect?" Koushiro repeated. "Yeah, that's a funny way to describe a heist that involved unexpected crowd control."

"Oh, don't be like that," Takeru scolded. "She was probably a teenager, she couldn't wait to surrender."

"A witness is a witness," Koushiro insisted. "She saw you and she saw what we were doing, which we didn't plan on having to deal with, which is an unexpected variable. Besides, she slowed us down significantly."

"Has third party security even thrown up the sirens yet?" Takeru asked. "We're already three blocks away, in a perfectly inconspicuous van, with nobody chasing us."

"Sirens just went out," Koushiro answered. "The police should be there in about ninety seconds."

"Well, this van'll be going up in flames in about ninety seconds, so I'd say we're doing pretty well," Daisuke said, turning the van off into a side street. "Alright, get the gas bomb ready. Switch number one is imminent."

"Don't worry about the girl," Takeru insisted.

"It's just...awful oversight," Koushiro groaned. "I just didn't consider the fans in the bathrooms being that strong."

"Like I said," Ken said. "Horrible luck that anyone was in there at that exact moment. Don't sweat it. And what the hell is she going to be able to do or say that changes anything at this point?"

Takeru nodded. "Alright, everyone grab the luggage, switch is coming up on the right."

OOO

Hikari blinked rapidly as the blindfold was yanked from her face, stretching up above her head. Comfortingly, the policewoman kneeling in front of her was the first thing she saw, a far more soothing sight than a man in a gas mask. Even the police woman's face, curled in a grimace of stress and concern, was better than that mask.

"Who are you? What happened?" she immediately demanded. Hikari swallowed. It had been probably less than five minutes since she had heard the thieves leave the store, which meant time still played a major factor.

"H-Hikari Yagami," she quickly answered. "I came out of the bathroom and they were putting everything in gym bags, they handcuffed me."

"They?" the officer continued. "How many? When? What did they look like?"

Hikari was ready. She was going to stick the landing on this. She wasn't going to be phased by the police being pushy or demanding. She might just be able to make a real difference here.

"Three people, jumpsuits, black gas masks," she reeled off. "One was a male, I don't know about the other two, only one got close to me." She glanced up over her shoulder, towards the table she was cuffed to. "They said they left the key on the table."

Quickly, the officer grabbed a small metal key from the corner of the table, then reached down with an aggressive motion towards Hikari's hands. "Everyone else in the store is asleep, why aren't you?"

"I...I don't know, I was in the bathroom anddddd…" as soon as the handcuffs were off, Hikari jumped to her feet and spun around, looking back towards the entrance of the store. "...aand I'm here with my friends and—"

"I'm sure your friends are fine," the officer said, grabbing Hikari's shoulder and spinning her back around to face her. "These people are all asleep, we're just being cautious about waking them up right now since we don't know what was used to knock them out. Now, I need as much information as you have as fast as possible right now. My transmitter is sending out to the station right now, the things you tell me now could make all the difference in stopping these guys before they get away."

Hikari shook herself off. Right. She could be concerned about her friends in a minute.

"I went into the bathroom for a few minutes, when I came out, everyone was knocked out and half the store had been bagged," Hikari said. "One of them was right in front of me, he pulled a gun and cuffed me to the table." Her mind raced with details of her encounter, trying to plow through everything as quickly as possible while maintaining coherency. "There were two others that I saw. There might have been more, but I saw three."

"Alright, jumpsuits and gas masks," the officer repeated. "Three people, anything else?"

"Uh…" Hikari thought for a moment. "The one who handcuffed me. Thin build, kind of slim. I think one of the other two was kind of short, but I'm not sure. Uh…"

She looked over at the shelf a few steps away from the bathroom doors. She walked over to it.

"Ma'am?" the officer asked. "What?"

"When I...when I came out, he was standing right here," Hikari said, stopping and planting her feet just about a foot to the right of the shelf. She summoned up all her memories of the last ten minutes, searching for exact details. Fortunately, the fear seemed to have seared itself onto her brain, creating accurate replications of the previous few moments.

"I...his head was here," she said, pointing up at a spot on the shelf, four levels up. "The top of his head, it came up to here." She tapped her finger on a spot. "That's how tall he is. However high up that is."

"Wow," the officer said, voice going a little soft and gentle after several sentences of harsh utterances. "Okay, we'll...we'll check that out for sure later, but…I guess that'd be about a hundred and ninety centimeters. One-ninety, slim build."

"Right-handed," Hikari added suddenly. "He pulled the gun out and held it in his right hand."

"Okay, wow," the officer said. "Someone was playing attention." She looked around the store. "Okay, we'll...we'll get that out to the force, and you can...reconstruct what you saw for the crime scene investigators when they get out here in a few minutes."

Hikari felt quite proud of herself. Her information had even managed to take the edge off this policewoman. With the adrenaline fading, her alertness began to drop, her mind grateful that it no longer had to work so hard. She nearly sat down on the floor, about to let exhaustion take over her, when she suddenly remembered.

"Oh!" She jumped up, quickly dashing back over towards where the ring displays had been, quickly finding her friends laying on the floor, Lily's pink mop in a haphazard mess and Ren's flowing jet black locks pooled against the carpet. "Are they okay?!"

OOO

"I'm gonna need some time with this," Koushiro said as Takeru popped the trunk on the hatchback, revealing the stuffed-full gym bags. "Some serious time. Months, could be a year before I push everything out."

The light blue hatchback was backed into a large garage, big enough for three cars. Other than a collection of tools against the left wall, it was bare, peeling white paint and oil-stained concrete giving the appearance of a garage that was never used. The five young adults were staring at the haul in the back of the car, only professionalism keeping them from doing backflips as they considered the significance of their heist.

"Gonna melt the gold, silver and platinum down, sell everything separately, no chance of anything being linked to this, but it's going to take awhile." Koushiro pulled down the zipper on one of the bags, peering inside at the treasure within. Takeru took a moment to appreciate that this was the closest he was ever going to come to being an actual pirate, as he was missing only a map with an X marking the spot.

They had switched cars five times in total, going as far as thirty miles outside of the city limits to make one of the changes. There was no such thing as overkill right now. They had, after all, spent countless hours searching every square meter of the city, as well as much of the surrounding areas, for places where surveillance was lax enough that something like a car swap could take place without immediate detection by the police. They may as well use them before another tax hike produced the funds for a new collection of cameras that would ruin it.

"A-are you guys sure about this place?" Daisuke asked, looking around the garage. "I mean, I don't want to be the one who says it, but would it really be _that_ shocking if your Uncle ended up doing something to bust us?"

Koushiro sighed. "There are only so many back alleys without camera coverage left in the world, Daisuke. Sometimes you have to conduct a bit of business on private property, and this is about as good as it gets. My Uncle hates technology as much as he hates the deep state, we're fine."

"I know, but...he's not the most...y'know, mentally stable," Daisuke protested.

"Well, you have to be a little off your rocker to let people store close to thirty million in stolen jewelry on your property," Koushiro pointed out. "The stuff will be fine here, this is the best I can do."

"I think we pulled it off," Ken said, nodding slowly. "I mean...nowhere else left to drive, no more car switches to make, just...we did it." He looked over at Koushiro, then came over and smacked him on the back. "You know how many people have gone down in the last ten years trying to grab a rack of bracelets from the booths by the beach? Not even make it thirty steps before the tasers hit? They go to jail for ten years going for a couple grand in knockoff bracelets, meanwhile we're pulling this stuff off without a hitch."

Koushiro nodded. "Yeah, it's...alright." He cleared his throat. "Let's stash it and get out of here. We can celebrate in a couple days, but let's give it a couple days. May as well."

Takeru wiped at his eyes, then looked up. "Koushiro, you...you let me know as soon as you get your hands on a fizzer, and I'll go plant it."

Koushiro came over and smacked him on the back. "Will do. Good job with the crowd control too, nice improvisation."

"Yeah," Takeru said, voice a little throaty. "I'm going to need a new pair of handcuffs, though. Preferably before my next date."

OOO

She hadn't been in a police station since her last close encounter with criminals four years prior. It didn't seem to have been redesigned in any significant way since. As near as she could remember, and apparently her memory was quite good, the station was as it was the last time she had been there. She sat on the far side of a small desk, a short balding man opposite her, staring at a pair of computer screens in front of him. She glanced around awkwardly.

"Yeah, I...they lost the trail," he said, shaking his head sadly. "They kept dumping cars, and...yeah, these guys are really good."

Hikari's head fell a little bit. She knew it wasn't remotely her fault, but part of her was really hoping that, somehow, someway, what she had to say might make a difference. That somehow, her recollections could have resulted in an early resolution to this case.

"Oh, there's gonna be hell to pay for this one," he mumbled. "Thirty million, damn near, and all we've got are a couple of torched cars to go on. They're gonna turn every jewelry store into a bank vault now, probably make the security guards wear gas masks too."

"Uh...Sergeant Walker," Hikari said, raising her hand up into the air. "I...I don't know how useful this is going to be, but I have something else that might at least be interesting."

"Alright, well…"

Hikari jolted up a couple centimeters and twisted to look over her shoulder at the sound of a slamming door. Another officer, this one in uniform, marched up towards Walker's desk, visibly scowling.

"Nothing on the handcuffs or the key that can help us," he grunted, sweeping right past Hikari with minimal acknowledgement of her presence. "The gas they used to knock everyone out is gone without a trace, so we don't even know where to start with that. And the dispersion device they used is generic as can be. We're dealing with some damn professionals alright."

"We've been dealing with professionals for years," Walker said, spreading his arms out to his sides. "We've been taking professionals down for years. There weren't any professionals left, where did these guys come from?"

The newcomer frowned heavily. "They didn't even fire a single bullet for us to take to the lab. All we can do now is...hope they're dumb enough to try to fence some of the goods to one of our undercovers."

"You know they're gonna melt it all down if they have two brain cells to rub together," Walker said. "Now, our witness said she had something else to tell us."

The man rolled his eyes. "I don't see how it can help us now, but...go ahead." He clasped his hands together in front of his waist and turned to face Hikari. She felt a bit of trepidation as his domineering glare, but shook it off.

"I...this might sound ridiculous, but...you can look this up, I'm sure, this isn't the first time I've been a witness to a major crime," Hikari said. She had wrestled with discussing this ever since she had been escorted into the station, thinking it was important and crucial one moment, then deciding it would make her sound foolish and childish the next. Ultimately, she had put it off until after things had wound down a bit, as it couldn't possibly have been relevant to the immediate chase, but had finally decided to at least mention it. "T-the bearer bonds, four years ago."

Walker scoffed. "Oh yeah, that's a real white whale for a lot of folks here." He shook his head. "We thought that one was an embarrassment, this one'll be worse."

"I was caught up in that one too," Hikari continued. "I ended up near one of their escape vehicles, they practically ran me over, and…" she bit her lip. "...I...I have reason to believe that...someone who was involved in that was involved today."

Walker raised an eyebrow. "That's...well, that's quite a big jump you're making."

"Putting it nicely," the uniformed officer agreed. "What, did one of them...wear the same cologne or something?"

"Hm," Walker muttered. "We've never caught anyone involved in the bearer bond lift," he admitted. "Four years later, someone from that crew, who was good enough to make a major score once, is good enough to do it a second time. I guess when you put the pieces together like that…"

"If someone got away with something that insane once, why would they even _consider_ trying it again? They know how rare it is to get away with major heists, if you pulled it off the first time, you'd have to be stupid to try it again."

"Four years ago, maybe the money ran out. There probably aren't that many people in the world good enough to get away with a major robbery, two jobs in the same city could be linked."

"Even if the same guy _did_ go for the double-dip, he'd never do it in the same city! He'd probably go to a different continent, but he'd at least move a time zone or two! It doesn't make sense."

Hikari cleared her throat loudly, getting both of the officers to stop their fruitless back-and-forth. Immediately, her mouth dried up and she felt her face going red, regretting her irritation getting the best of her and causing her to act somewhat rudely around police officers.

"So, what gave you that idea?" Walker asked her, seemingly snapping her back into the conversation. "Just, assuming it's the same people because major crimes like this are so rare?" He shrugged. "It's not absurd."

"N-no," Hikari said. "I...I remember that day, four years ago, very well. I thought I was going to be killed for a moment, you don't forget things like that. And...and one of the things I remember was...one of them said something to me on that day. You can find all this on the records of my testimony, I'm sure. They were walking past me, one of them said something to me. I remember what he said to me, word for word. And today, I heard that same thing again. The exact same words, in the exact same order, in the exact same way."

The two officers stared at her for what felt like several seconds. "Okay...what was it?"

"Well, both times, I...I offered them my purse," Hikari explained. "It was all I had, and it was the best I could think of while I was panicking. And both times, I was told the same thing." She swallowed down hard. "Don't worry, we're not here for your money. Just maybe don't say too much to the police. They won't be able to do anything with it anyway."

The officer that she didn't know the name of wrinkled his face. "That's it?"

"Well, it's kind of a long statement," Hikari said defensively.

"What else is a criminal trying to steal thirty million dollars going to say?" he asked rhetorically. "He's about to make off with Angelique's entire display set, and he wants some teenager's purse?"

Hikari allowed herself to feel annoyed for a half-second, given that she wasn't a teenager anymore, but it passed.

"No, that's what small criminals do, they throw back the guppies when they're hunting for the whales, that's not...that's not unique."

"I know, but it was the exact same words in the exact same way!" Hikari said. "If he was just conveying the same idea, I wouldn't have thought anything of it, but...it feels like too much to just be a coincidence. He...he could have said...keep the purse, just keep your lips zipped, or...we don't need your stuff, but do us a favor and keep quiet in questioning, or...anything else, but he said exactly _that_?"

Walker looked over at his co-worker. "Y'know, it'll look better if we can add an extra line to the suspect profile."

He sighed, looking back over at his fellow policeman, then pausing for a minute. "Well, at least something around here will look better." He rolled his eyes. "Alright, uh...suspect may have also been involved in bearer bond heist four years ago, I guess that's...throw it in there. Can't imagine it helping a lick."

"Alright, at least it's something," Walker said. "Well, Miss Yagami, you've been a star witness. One point eighty-five meters tall, slim build, right-handed, and possibly involved in another monster case, and you were blindfolded basically the whole time!"

Hikari nodded, again feeling quite proud of herself. "Well, Sergeant Walker, I...I hope you get these guys. If it is the same person, I've...I've been terrorized by him more than enough for one lifetime."


	5. Reparations

Chapter Four: Reparations

"You know what occurs to me, the part of this that kind of sucks?" Daisuke said, setting his glass bottle down on the floor in front of his chair. "So, after Koushiro's done fencing all the take, and we all get our cuts, I'm going to have millions of units, and there's going to be no way that I can use it to get women."

"Wouldn't help you anyway," Takeru countered. "You could have ninety-five percent of the world's GDP and it wouldn't matter."

"Also, false, you just have to be creative," Ken added, pulling another bottle out of the refrigerator and turning to look at his companions. "And keep people at arm's length, don't let them in too much."

"No no no, that's what I mean," Daisuke said. "I mean, no arm's length stuff, something...something long term, something serious. I'll be a young adult male with millions of units, an alpha personality and a high sperm count, and—"

Ken snorted loudly. "What, you...you check that frequently? You keep tabs on your sperm count?"

"Okay, no more talk about that," Takeru said quickly, waving his hand over towards Daisuke. "But, really, uh...I think our career choices preclude serious, long-term relationships, and we should all know that." He shrugged.

"For multiple reasons," Iori said, entering the living room from the hallway. "Just have fun while you can, buddy. We're about to be too busy for that kind of thing anyway."

A series of sharp raps from the front door interrupted the conversation. Daisuke looked up over his shoulder. "It's open!" he called out. The moment the words left his mouth, the door flew open. Koushiro stormed in.

"Oh, look, it's Latey McLaterson," Daisuke said dryly. "I'd say we ran out of beers, but mister water and lemonade over here has made sure that's not happening." He pointed over at Takeru. Koushiro, however, seemed to be quite focused on something, and walked right up to Takeru. "And take your shoes off, damn. My carpet's shitty enough as it is."

"Not now," Koushiro said warningly, holding a small tablet in his hands. "Takeru, how tall are you?"

Takeru's face wrinkled, looking up at his older friend. "What?"

"Height. Your body. Distance from ground." Koushiro sounded agitated and serious, though Takeru couldn't possibly imagine why.

"Uh...one point eighty-five, I think," Takeru replied, scratching at his hairline, giving an odd look over at Ken. "Six foot one as far as the imperial dinosaurs in Stanten are concerned."

"Okay, how much do you weigh?" Koushiro tapped his finger on the tablet a couple times.

"Are you setting up a...profile for me on a dating site?" Takeru asked, standing up from his chair to look down at the tablet. "Because, seriously, don't, and what the hell are you thinking?"

Koushiro scowled. "Eighty-one kilos?"

"Yeah, actually, now…" Takeru twisted his head around to try to read the wall of text on the tablet.

"The feds released some information about the robbery to the public earlier today," Koushiro explained. "Included was a profile of one of the robbers." He handed the tablet to Takeru. "And by one of the robbers, I mean you."

Takeru's forehead wrinkled. "One-eighty five centimeters, eighty-one kilos, uh...the hell?"

Ken jolted up from his seat, running over to look over Takeru's shoulder. "Oh, shit! How'd they get that?"

"Um…" Takeru put the tablet down at his side. "Okay, I guess...uh, the cameras inside the store—"

"I purged those video files," Koushiro interrupted. "We had the entire network monitored during the whole time we were in there, nothing was being transmitted, and I dumped the whole batch right after we were done."

"Okay, uh...we probably showed up on video feeds from cameras across the street," Takeru suggested. "Camera uses smart technology to compare my height to other objects in the vicinity, gives a good estimation, determines my weight from body size."

"Yeah, we did show up on a video across the street," Koushiro agreed, as Daisuke reached down towards Takeru's hand to grab the tablet. "A video shot by a garden-variety security camera that hasn't been updated in twelve years that could barely make out anything, believe me, I checked."

"Besides, if it was that, there'd probably be similar data on everyone," Ken said, voice hushed, sobering up quickly.

Takeru sighed. "Uh...well, we did leave one witness, I guess." He shrugged. "Must of been her."

Daisuke's eyes widened as he looked over the text on the tablet.

"At least she didn't say anything all that important," Takeru mused. "Height, weight, I can live with that."

Daisuke thrust the tablet in front of Takeru. "Buddy, you should keep reading."

Takeru's eyes ran left to right rapidly. "Blah blah blah...right handed, believed to have also been involved in the TevCo Bearer Bond theft of four years...ago…" Takeru trailed off.

"Yeah. So there's that," Koushiro said, a dry deadpan that betrayed the obvious distress this revelation entailed.

"Ho-ly shit," Ken enunciated slowly. "How the hell?!"

Takeru's mouth fell open in shock, looking down at the tablet, then Koushiro. "How?"

"My question exactly," Koushiro said. "How?"

"Oh, boy," Takeru muttered, collapsing back into his seat, putting his hands up on his face. "You gotta be kidding me."

"Well, at least we can avoid maximum security centers since we've never actually killed anyone," Daisuke said in a lamenting moan. "Man, I thought we got away with it too." He turned away from the group. "I'll grab the emergency kit and start the car."

"It's been four years, how did the trail not go cold!" Iori snapped, rocketing up to a standing position.

"Okay, okay," Takeru said, putting his hands out to his sides. "Okay, hold on everyone." He pointed over at Daisuke, who was about to leave the room. "Leave the kit, hold the car."

"Every second we spend here is another second closer to us being surrounded by DOJ agents," Daisuke protested.

"Let's...let's think about this," Takeru said.

"Buddy, this is REALLY freaking bad!" Daisuke said, coming back into the room. "Look, I'm not blaming anyone, I don't think anyone is, but...dude, this...this is a disaster!"

"D-don't panic yet," Takeru ordered. "Yeah, it's...it's definitely not good, but...let's try to understand this." He took in a deep breath. "Nobody's loading up a car, nobody's fleeing the country, nobody's going underground."

"Okay," Koushiro agreed. "So, the girl in the jewelry store just so happened to have a photographic memory or some sort of covert ops training, and was able to deduce your height and weight by just looking at you for a few seconds."

"Yeah, uh...let's assume that," Takeru said lamely.

"For the record, I am not assuming that," Daisuke pointed out.

"But let's assume that we are assuming," Takeru said. "Yeah, my height and weight are pretty common, people don't actually think about those kinds of things when they see you in public...most people could never guess someone's height on sight anyway. So, whatever."

"Alright…" Ken thought for a minute. "There haven't been any massive robberies within a two hundred mile radius over the four year span between our two jobs," Ken reasoned. "So, the feds know that, so they figure that it must be the same people doing it. There aren't many people left in the world who would even consider trying to rob a jewelry store, they just assume it's the same people who did the bearer bonds."

"No, no, no," Koushiro muttered. "No, they...they're singling out Takeru. If that was it, they'd say that the whole team was believed to be the same. But it's just one person. There's a reason why they would say that about one person," he reasoned. "But what?"

"Uh…" Takeru scratched at the top of his head. "I...look, everyone here can back me up, we had one witness. That's it. Koushiro just said the cameras were a non-factor, nobody said anything that gave anything away, and…"

He blinked a few times, eyes slowly narrowing into a squint, his brain spinning as he desperately tried to find a connection somewhere. Daisuke waved his hand in front of Takeru's face a few times.

"Dude, are you broken?" Daisuke asked.

"Holy shit," Takeru said, standing up straight. "That girl." He rubbed at his temples. "I've...I just realized something, I've seen her before."

"Oh, wow, we're really screwed," Iori moaned. "We left a living witness who took swimming lessons with Takeru for two years when they were teenagers."

"Hey, I didn't say that!" Takeru snapped. "No, no, nothing like that, I...we don't know each other, but...the bearer bond heist. She was the girl! She was the girl by the escape vehicle!"

Everyone in the room glanced at each other, puzzle pieces snapping into place.

"Remember? We took the motorcycles to the first sedan, there was a girl hanging around there? You guys remember, right?"

"You know what?" Ken said. "I think you're right."

"Okay, well, that's about the unluckiest thing in the history of criminal activity," Koushiro grunted, rolling his eyes. "But...what else? There has to be something else."

"Her being present for both hits isn't a justification for her knowing that you were there both times, not when you're wearing a mask and a uniform," Daisuke agreed.

"God dammit," Takeru hissed through gritted teeth. "That...it has to be that, somehow." He looked up at Koushiro. "We need the files from her testimony."

Koushiro shook his head back and forth. "We just committed the biggest robbery the world has seen in over a decade, there's a hundred percent chance that their files got moved to a secure offsite server that I could never access in a thousand years."

Takeru winced. "Okay, okay...this girl's the key. Has to be." He nodded a few times. "Let's figure out who she is. Uh...dammit, she offered me her purse and everything, I should have grabbed her identification card."

"Alright, I have an idea," Koushiro said, shrugging a backpack off his shoulders and setting it down on the floor in front of him.

Daisuke rolled his eyes as Koushiro pulled a laptop from his bag. "And we were supposed to celebrate tonight."

OOO

"I didn't steal the video files from the store cameras," Koushiro reminded Ken as he tapped through a series of terminals on his laptop's computer screen. "I purged them, I don't have them."

"Okay. Camera across the street?" Ken suggested.

"Not good enough resolution for a face match," Koushiro replied quickly. "Would you ever believe you'd be wishing that the government had more surveillance cameras?"

"So then what?" Daisuke asked.

"The police station," Koushiro said. "She would have been taken to a station for her testimony. We can find her there."

"You're not going to hack into a police station's closed circuit system from my house, are you?" Daisuke asked. "If you won't do this stuff from your house, then—"

"No, I'm not that stupid," Koushiro assured him. "What I can do is access the cameras on the buildings across the street that are used to monitor roof access above the donut shop."

"Donut shop across the street from the police station?" Daisuke said, leaning over Koushiro's shoulder. "Is that one so obvious I can't even say anything?"

Takeru paced away from the action, towards the window, eyes narrowing as he peered through the darkness, out at the front driveway. There was that lingering fear in the back of his skull that, someway, somehow, they had all been burned and that an army of cops would be bearing down on Daisuke's house at any moment. But, as it had been for the last half hour, there was nothing going on outside.

"This camera got installed six months ago," Koushiro said, pulling up a window on his screen. "So it's good enough. And it's just an external cam for security on a small shop, so peeking it won't put up any red flags."

The window began to show an elevated view down at a small rooftop, a street intersection and a two-story structure visible down below. Lines of cars puttered along the street lanes, a parking lot in front of the structure filled with assorted vehicles.

"Okay...back up three days or so," Koushiro muttered as Ken watched him intently. "Looks like this thing saves footage up to a month."

"How are we gonna find her?" Iori asked. "None of us saw her for more than a few seconds, and our minds were elsewhere."

"If I see her, I'll recognize her," Takeru said assuredly, coming over towards Koushiro. "No doubt in my mind."

"Well, she must have arrived at the station sometime that day," Koushiro said. "As early as ten minutes after we left, maybe...a couple hours after at the latest."

Ken grimaced. "This should be a fun two hours, then."

"Always automate wherever possible," Koushiro said. "I'll pull up some face detection software up and watch the parking lot. Everyone with a face who passes through that lot will pop up in it, and she'll be in there somewhere."

"Magical," Daisuke marveled.

"More like terrifying," Takeru corrected. "That he can even do this. If he can do this, then so can the state."

Footage from the camera zoomed by, the speakers on the laptop beeping rapidly.

"I...I just hope we're not way off on this," Ken muttered. "I'm still not completely convinced we shouldn't be heading towards the border right now."

"Look, it...let's be reasonable," Takeru encouraged. "Somehow, someway, this girl figured out that I was part of both robberies, but...that's it. The report didn't mention my name or...any of you." He shook his head. "I'd already be in a stone cell if she was able to tell them my name, so...probably, what was contained in the report is all they know. Some guy involved in one robbery was also involved in the other, but they have no idea who that guy is."

"They know his height and weight," Daisuke pointed out. "It's still not great."

"But it's not a leave town type disaster," Takeru countered. "Not yet."

"Okay, we've got a bunch of faces...let's cut it down to females only, and…" he looked over at Takeru. "What do you think? Late teens? Early twenties?"

"Somewhere in there, yeah, let's start there," Takeru said.

"Well, there won't be too many of those," Koushiro replied as he clicked a few buttons on the screen. "So this shouldn't take long."

Takeru looked down at Koushiro's screen as a few grainy profile pictures popped up. He squinted to study them, quickly finding a youthful face with brown hair that fell short of the woman's shoulders.

"Third from the left, that's her," Takeru said. "Definitely."

"Hm," Ken muttered. "Yeah, I think so. I didn't see her for very long in there, but...looks right." He smirked. "She's rocking the Ken haircut."

"Or you're rocking her haircut," Iori pointed out.

"Let's figure out who she is," Takeru said. "Run it through facial recognition."

Koushiro shook his head. "Not from here. Not on this computer." He closed the laptop gently. "This is all we can do from here." He stood up, looking over at Takeru. "So, I'll get some information together, and...tomorrow afternoon around four, I'll come by your place."

Takeru nodded.

"And then...well, I don't know what happens then." Koushiro grimaced. "But we can't just leave this hanging."

OOO

"Hikari Yagami."

Koushiro tossed a brown folder on the countertop, Takeru quick to flip the front cover and looking at a couple of pictures of a young adult woman with short brown hair.

"Yup, that would be the girl," Takeru confirmed, pulling the sheet of paper with the pictures out of the folder and focusing on a few text documents.

"Woman," Koushiro correct. "Technically. She's twenty, so...by a couple years."

Takeru nodded. "I'm sure she'd be horribly offended if she were listening to our conversation."

"I'm just saying," Koushiro replied casually. "So, I bounced her name through the Bastromo database, which I hate doing, but it felt necessary, and I pulled everything on her." He tapped the surface of the top piece of paper. "Never been more bored in my life."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Takeru asked, picking the folder up and judging the thickness of the stack of papers.

"There is nothing in here of any interest or illumination," Koushiro explained. "I brought the printout just because, but...I'd avoid reading it unless you're having a hard time getting to sleep tonight." He rolled his eyes. "Her father's an accountant, she's got an older brother, she grew up in an apartment on 83rd and Ruby, she attended Brighton Academy, she works as a waitress at a restaurant called Fuku Bistro, and she's taking these online learning courses on qualifications to be a pre-academy instructor."

Takeru flipped through the stack of papers. "That doesn't sound that different from most people's lives, most people don't live like us. Nothing surprising about any of that."

"Well, I know that," Koushiro replied. "Point is, this is your average, everyday, typical young adult woman trying to make her way through life, she doesn't have...there's nothing in her file that says she should be able to look at someone for three seconds in a high-stress situation and nail their exact height and weight. And maybe that's a fluke, but there's no way in hell she should be able to know that you're the same guy who participated in the bearer bond job. This isn't someone who's had any sort of secret agent training, or is a world-renowned detective. This is just a young woman who likes cats, lives in a tiny apartment, and wants to be a teacher."

Takeru puffed a long breath out of his nostrils. "Yeah. So we still don't really know anything."

"And so long as we don't know anything, there's no way you can be involved in any future work," Koushiro finished. "So...unless we can get our hands on the original testimony documents, I don't really know what to do."

Takeru leaned back against the counter, pressing his hands up towards his nose, thinking. "Okay. Getting the testimony documents is out. Even if we could do it, it would take too long. So, you said she worked at a restaurant, right?"

"Fuku Bistro," Koushiro said.

"Alright." Takeru swallowed. "Here's what I'm thinking. Tonight, I can go plant a bug on the external security camera at this place. We'll study the archive footage, figure out when she works there, maybe which times they're the least busy. Then, tomorrow, I'll go there, eat there, make sure I'm in her section or whatever. She'll wait my table, so we'll interact, and...well, we'll see if she recognizes me or makes a connection."

"And...if she does?" Koushiro asked. "I mean, talk about kicking the hornet's nest. If she realizes who you are, then the game is up, and you'll be in a public place with surveillance that we don't have any control over."

Takeru rubbed his mouth. "Well, if she recognizes me, I'll know. Like you said, this woman is about as typical as they come, she doesn't have any...special military training or undercover agent training. If she suddenly runs into someone that she knows pointed a gun at her a few days ago, it's going to be obvious from her reaction. There's no hiding something like that. So, if she gives anything off, I'll set off a flashbang. A big one, disable everyone in there for a few minutes. You'll be watching on the cameras, this place should have a pretty elementary security system, you'll kill the silent alarm and purge the video recording. And, obviously, if she recognizes me, then I'm burned, and I need to leave town anyway, so I'll do that. And...we'll see what happens."

Koushiro frowned. "We'd be giving her information," he pointed out. "She might not know what you look like, even if she knows you're the same person from the bearer bond job. If we do this, and she realizes you're the same person, now she's seen you. And apparently, she has a talent for memorizing stuff about people."

"I'd rather have her recognize me while I'm looking at her and can tell she recognizes me," Takeru pointed out. "Better than her recognizing me when we pass each other on the sidewalk and I don't notice. At least this way I have some control of the situation. And besides, like you said, we need more information. This is the best way to get it."

"Alright," Koushiro said, nodding. "God, this whole thing doesn't make any sense, I just...I just implied that it was possible that she would recognize you by looking at you without knowing what you look like." He gave his head a couple shakes. "Wow, I'm deep down a rabbit hole."

Takeru went over to one of the drawers just beneath the countertop, pulling it open and reaching down to pry up the cardboard lining the bottom. Three golden coins were hidden there, and he grabbed one. "Okay, I'll plant the tracer tonight, I'll call you when I'm about to plant it." He held up the coin. "And I hope you're getting the jewelry out, I'm almost out of these."

Koushiro sighed. "If tomorrow doesn't go well...then it's not really going to matter for you."

OOO

Hikari squeezed either side of the sink counter in her fingers, leaning forward slightly into the plastic basin, looking up at the mirror. Thankfully, nobody else was in there with her, giving her a precious few moments alone.

She gave her head a couple quick shakes, staring at herself. Looking at herself like this gave her some confidence. For all in life that she wasn't confident about, looking at herself in this outfit, the Sailor Fuku worn by all the waitresses, made her feel good about herself. She looked good. Good enough to get hired at a place like this, where looking good in this outfit was a requirement.

Which was good, because confidence was suddenly in short supply for her.

She cringed a bit as the main door to the restroom swung open. She used the mirror to look at her best friend, wearing a matching outfit.

"Sweetie, just ask for the time, everyone will understand," Lily said, her brown shoes clicking across the floor as she walked up behind Hikari. "Everyone, including Harold, will give you a few days off if you ask."

"I don't need it," Hikari insisted. "I'm fine."

"I've known you for years," Lily said. "And I've never known you to be one who needs to go to the bathroom every hour to stare at yourself in the mirror."

"I'm hot," Hikari mumbled. "I just want to cool down in here, it's cooler in here."

"Hikari, you had a gun pointed at you!" Lily said.

"Yes, and...you don't need to remind me," Hikari replied, closing her eyes.

"You were handcuffed and blindfolded by an armed criminal! And then you had to go over every single thing that happened to you over and over again for the police. Forgetting the fact that all that has to be exhausting...how can you not be...you know, a little out of it? It's okay to admit that, and it's okay to say you need a couple days off to deal with it."

"Well, what difference would it make?" Hikari said, not quite snapping but coming as close as she could to it. "Couple days off, what changes? What happened to me doesn't...change. Take a couple days off, at that point why not just take the rest of my life off?"

"It...it could be useful for you to reset and settle yourself. It's hard to do that when you're exhausting yourself here all day," Lily explained.

"Well...I'll...I'll work through it," Hikari insisted, standing up straight. "It happened three days ago now, and...I didn't take any days off, so it can't get any harder from here."

Lily sighed. "You should have just taken the day right after off like I asked you to."

"Well, I need full-sized paychecks right now," Hikari said. "And, if I was able to get through the first couple days fine...I'm not going to do it now."

"Sweetie, I'm just...I'm concerned. You're not built to go through things like that, I know you." She glanced around the otherwise unoccupied chamber. "Like, something like that, you could have some kind of...P.T.S.D."

"Well, P.T.S.D. is for rich people, apparently," Hikari replied dryly. "Alright, I'm...I'm fine, let's get back out there."

With that, she spun around past her friend and made for the door, Lily walking alongside her.

"Time for my greatest fear, opening bathroom doors," Hikari muttered to herself as she swung the door open. The two girls weren't two steps out of the chamber, however, when a tall, thin man stepped in front of them, holding a tablet.

"Oh, there you are!" he said, sounding out of breath.

"Uh, yeah...where else would I be?" Hikari said nervously, glancing over to the side.

"You've got a single on table seven," he explained, looking down at the tablet for a brief moment. "And I wanted to let you know that he specifically requested to be sat in your section."

"O-oh," Hikari said, straightening up slightly. "P-probably a friend from academy that I haven't seen in awhile."

"Well, don't socialize too much if that's the case. Dinner rush starts in about forty-five minutes, so even though we're slow right now, the sooner he gets out the better."

"Yeah, yeah, I know," Hikari said, giving Lily a firm squeeze on the shoulder before stepping around the Maitre D and down the skinny hallway.

It was that period of time between late lunch eaters and early dinner eaters, that sweet spot where you might only have to handle one or two tables at a time. The time where you could sneak off to the bathroom for five minutes and not have anybody particularly care.

Hikari came around the corner, looking out at the large room of tables and seats, finding her section. Sure enough, table seven held a single prospective customer, on the left side of the small circular surface that food could be placed on. She studied him for a moment, noting the short blonde hair and pale skin that she couldn't place as any of her friends or acquaintances. He had his face down in a menu though, so surely she'd put the pieces together with a better look.

Quickly, she stepped across the room. "Good afternoon sir," she said airily, putting a cheerful smile on her face. It occurred to her, briefly, that if this was someone that she didn't know from before, it was possible that this was simply someone who found her particularly attractive and wanted to interact with her specifically. And right now, that flattering thought was welcome as she grappled with the mental trauma of recent events.

"Welcome to Fuku Bistro, can I start you off with something to drink?" she said, adopting the cheery personality that went with her outfit, projecting the academy-aged girl that she was effectively playing. Even if she didn't totally feel it, she could put on the act well enough.

He looked up from the menu. "Probably just water, actually. What I really need is help navigating this menu..." he looked down at the nameplate on her uniform, "...Hikari."

Hikari took a brief moment to examine him. Sharp blue eyes and short blonde hair, pale skin, striking good looks...off-hand, she couldn't recall ever knowing this individual. In a way, this excited her more, as now there was some mystery behind his interest in her.

"How do you mean, sir?" Hikari asked, quickly setting herself back in a cheery, confident persona.

"Oh, well, I've never eaten here before," He said, sounding just a touch theatrical. "So I don't know what you guys are all about." He looked around the mostly-empty restaurant. "I mean, besides outfit coordination. Unless this all happened accidentally, which...that'd be really embarrassing, right?"

Hikari gave a small laugh. "Oh, this is nothing, you should see inside Nevara Academy, all-girls, every last one wearing the same thing."

He smirked. "Now, what business would I have inside an all-girls academy, one wonders. Do I just give off the aura of being someone up to no good, maybe?"

Hikari felt herself go a little red. "U-uh, maybe...well, in any case, I can vouch for everything on the menu. I've tried it all, and—"

"Don't say that everything's good," he interrupted. "That doesn't mean anything, doesn't tell me anything, that's...no, I understand, there's nothing on this menu that you peeled off the bottom of a dumpster, I get that. But, what's _good_ , really?" He stared up at her. "I'm a man in here for the first time ever, and it could just as easily be my last time ever, unless something here today impresses me. Given that fact, what would you want to put in front of me."

Hikari blinked a few times. Usually customers didn't have quite this much personality. "Uh...w-well, we have a Potato-Artichoke Soup, big chunks of Artichoke in it, and that comes with half a Turkey Club sandwich. I'm fond of that."

"Then let's go with that," he agreed. "I trust you know your way around this menu more than me, you've...you've been here awhile?"

"Long enough to try everything on the menu at least once," Hikari answered. "About eight months."

"Oh, well, then you're a bona fide expert, and I'd be a fool to trust anyone else," he said with a grin. "That'll be it, then."

"Coming right up," she said, skipping away towards the hallway in the left back corner of the restaurant. She turned the corner, nearly skidding right into Lily as she went over to a sliding panel in the right wall of the hall.

"Nothing like taking an early dinner order to cheer you up?" Lily asked, raising an eyebrow at the suddenly chipper waitress in front of her.

"Sure, why not?" Hikari replied quickly, grabbing the tiny knob on the sliding panel and pulling it back to reveal a window into the kitchen.

"You've heard that joke about all the waitresses wearing the same outfit every week since we started working here," Lily reminded her, pursing her lips. "You haven't even pretended to laugh at it in six months."

"Oh...well, he...he told it differently," Hikari answered. "Artichoke and Potato Soup with Turkey Club," she said through the window. "Extra Artichoke and Turkey." She shut the panel.

"Yeah, he didn't order extra anything, did he?" Lily said.

"D-don't you have...tables to wait?" Hikari asked, turning to look out into the restaurant.

"Actually, no, not right now," Lily answered. Indeed, the rest of the restaurant was inactive.

"Well...then...I dunno, go...refill the napkin holders," Hikari said.

OOO

"Well, I was correct to utilize your expertise in this area," he said, looking up from the empty bowl and plate in front of him. "That was wonderful."

Hikari grinned, feeling quite proud of herself, absentmindedly clasping her hands together in front of her. "Thank you, sir, I'm so glad you enjoyed it. I think it's one of our best."

"I'd be inclined to agree," he said. "If it isn't, then this might just be the greatest restaurant in all the world."

"Can I interest you in dessert?" she offered.

"Probably not a good idea," he said. "I work too hard to stay in shape to let it all go in a moment of weakness."

Hikari giggled, glancing down at the floor next to her. "Um...sir, if you don't mind me asking, I'm just curious...d-do I know you from somewhere?"

He thought for a moment, eyebrows rising up his forehead as he thought. "I mean, you would know that better than me, right?"

"N-n-no, I just...I know you requested my section specifically, and...well, I'm trying to figure out why," she said, hoping she hadn't just overstepped things by revealing that. "I'm sorry, I...I don't believe I know you."

"I don't know you," he answered. "Or at least, didn't until today. I just like to get the best service possible, and my gut told me you were the best here." He shrugged. "I trust my gut. Doesn't let me down often. That's all."

Going a bit red again, Hikari didn't even notice she was bouncing her heels up and down where she stood, looking like an anxious child who was tired of standing in the same place. "T-thank you, sir!"

"Your manners are deeply appreciated, but...feel free to call me TK," he said, looking up at her. "I'm a little too young for all that sir stuff."

"TK? Like the letters?" she asked.

"That's right," TK said, reaching over towards the touch screen embedded in the table. "Alright, thank you for the wonderful meal, I'll just wrap up here and get out of your way."

Hikari glanced around her section, noting that it was beginning to populate with a denser crowd, and reasoned she couldn't justify talking with TK anymore. She turned away, sweeping towards the left corner of the room, practically skating across the floor. She got maybe five steps before Lily jumped in front of her, giving her an amused look.

"One of these days, I'm actually going to run you over," Hikari warned her, screeching to a halt in front of her. "And I _know_ you have tables to wait on now, as do I, so—"

"He told you his name," Lily said. "That doesn't happen very often, does it? First time customer. That's gotta be meaningful."

"Oh...I'm just working my tip," Hikari insisted.

"Yeah, well…" Lily's eyes suddenly widened as they moved to look over Hikari's shoulder. Her cheeky grin fell and she gave a small gasp.

"What?" Hikari asked, turning around to look at whatever had caused Lily to freeze.

"It worked," Lily replied simply, sounding a little throaty. Hikari gasped as well on looking back at the table TK had just been sitting at. He had indeed vacated his seat, leaving behind a pile of dishes and a stack of rectangular bills. Hikari gasped, body clenching up at the sight.

Not quite believing her eyes, she quickly abandoned her thoughts of serving her other customers and stepped back towards the table. It was such a shocking sight, she couldn't help but forget her job duties. Sure enough, the bills were a couple orders of magnitude bigger than the ones she typically received, a difference that had a staggering effect on the value of the pile of money.

She reached forward, carefully grabbing the pile as if it might break into a million pieces if she wasn't delicate enough with it. Six bills worth a hundred units each, plus another worth fifty and a final one worth twenty. Her hands shook a little bit as she fanned it all out to look at it, highly confused.

"Hey, what's taking so long over here?"

Hikari's head snapped up, discovering her boss, Harold, standing right in front of her. She jumped a bit, then her eyes darted back down to the money in her hands. Harold followed her eyes down.

"I...holy crap, where'd that come from?!" Harold asked, recoiling slightly at the shocking sight.

With no time to do anything other than tell the truth, Hikari looked over towards the exit door, seeing the back of a man in a green waistcoat stepping onto the sidewalk outside. She mutely pointed towards him, recognizing the wearer of the odd choice of fashion as her customer of just moments before.

Before she could say anything, Harold snatched the pile of money from her hands and ran off towards the door after him. Hikari reached out towards Harold's back, mouth opening to say something that died in her throat. Slowly, her hand fell back to her side, as she gave a moaning little sigh.

"That was a fun five seconds," Lily said, clapping her arm around Hikari's back. Hikari glanced over to her right, seeing her friend move next to her. "But, come on. If this guy accidentally left his entire weekly paycheck here because he got distracted or something, you'd want him to get it back, right?"

Hikari scowled, but ultimately nodded. "Yeah, but...aw," she said, not really sure what else to say.

It had been such an eventful half-minute that neither girl moved to serve the new customers yet, watching as Harold disappeared out of the restaurant's front door.

"I'll bet I need it more than him," Hikari grumbled. "You usually don't accidentally leave seven hundred units somewhere unless you've got plenty to spare."

"I know, I know, it hurts right now," Lily said, patting her on the back. "Better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all."

Hikari was about to say something about how she wasn't in the mood to joke around, but suddenly Harold re-entered the restaurant, stack of money still in tow. Hikari's body tightened up again as he approached her, a look of mild shock on his face.

"Your lucky day," Harold said, holding the money out towards her. "He says there was no mistake, it's...it's yours."

Hikari stared down at Harold's hand for a moment, the realization that this money was unimpeachably hers taking a few seconds to settle in. And then, she reached out and took it, hands shaking again.

"Just make sure the kitchen gets some of that," Harold reminded her. "Also, dinner rush is here, so get your heads on straight!"

Hikari nodded. "Yes sir!" With energetic steps, then turned and ran back towards the table, suddenly feeling a surge of motivation to dedicate herself to the rest of her shift.

"So, _now_ do you have enough money to take a day off?" Lily asked as she ran past her towards her own area of tables.

"Take a day off?" Hikari replied. "Why would I ever need to do something like that?"


	6. Committed

Chapter Five: Committed

"She didn't recognize me," Takeru said, slowly shaking his head. "I would have known, it would have been obvious, there's no way she could have kept the act up like that if she did. And even beyond that, I'd be in a holding cell right now if she did recognize me."

Ken rubbed his eyes for a moment, leaning forward over the table surface. "Well, means we don't have to go to red alert, I guess."

"Then how?" Daisuke asked, leaning over the counter, nearly putting his face into the surface. "How did she know?"

"We're sure it had to be her, right?" Takeru asked, looking around the room of his apartment, at his friends and partners. "Like, is there someone else that could have put this together?"

Koushiro moved his jaw back and forth as he thought. "I've been watching things. There's been no official word from anyone in a position of authority that they believe the teams are the same. People are theorizing it, but...all we get solidly from the authorities is the one person."

"Voices?" Ken suggested. "Maybe they compared audio recordings?"

"No chance they could put that together. Takeru was wearing a gas mask at the second job," Koushiro pointed out. "I...I think Takeru's right, it's this waitress, she's the key. But I have no idea how."

Takeru pursed his lips. "Well, let's focus on the good news." He stood up from the kitchen chair, looking around the room. "She was right there in front of me, talked to me, had every opportunity to place me, and she didn't. So I don't have to leave town, nobody does. And, I think that we're clear to proceed with things as well. So, let's move forward with our plans."

Koushiro grimaced. "Probably. Not definitely. I prefer things to be definite, but it seems like that's not happening."

Takeru blinked a couple times, then went over to the couch in the middle area of the room. "Well, I say we can keep going like normal, and...in the meantime, I'll try to get her to tell me what she said to the police."

"Whoa," Daisuke said, jolting up a little bit. "Going all the way to the dark side, buddy? I kinda like it, I'm...I'm down with it."

"What are you babbling about?" Takeru asked, raising an eyebrow at his friend.

"You said it, not me," Daisuke insisted. "We got her apartment number, right? Night invasion, wake her up and say boo, she'll tell us everything we want to know. Push comes to shove, some pincers on her pinky finger should be more than enough."

"No!" Takeru snapped. "No no, you...idiot, no, I don't mean that." He rolled his eyes. "No, I...I have a pretty good sense for when a woman likes what she sees, you know. And I'm pretty sure I could at least get a few dates with her, if I played it right."

"That's...quite a bit of time to invest," Koushiro pointed out. "Could take...months. I'd expect it to take months, really."

"I-I'll still be able to work," Takeru said. "I just need to hang around until the...the right moment comes up and I can get some answers without making her suspicious."

Daisuke shrugged. "We could get answers immediately if we did my idea. We'd know today. Like, before midnight tonight."

"No!" Takeru snapped. "No, I'm...it's fine. I'll give it a few days, I'll go back to the restaurant, and...well, I'll be shocked if I can't get a date."

"By the way," Koushiro interjected. "Not sure how I feel about dropping a week's pay on the table like that. You know, in light of not wanting to draw attention to yourself right now, maybe not your greatest moment."

"Wait, what?" Ken asked, straightening back up and looking over at Takeru.

Takeru shrugged. "I cashed in one of my coins with Jou so I could buy a flashbang from Monzer, and...I don't know, I didn't need the rest of it. So I just left everything I had left on the table. Whatever, I was already drawing attention to myself by being in there and interacting with her like I was."

"But there's a difference between being a charismatic customer and a charismatic customer who randomly leaves a...forty-three hundred percent tip," Koushiro countered. "It's just something out of the ordinary that can draw attention to you."

"That's, I mean, I don't see how," Takeru said dismissively. "Besides, I feel bad for her, she...she didn't ask to be placed in the middle of that situation."

"Feel bad for her?" Daisuke repeated. "You didn't do anything to her."

"I pointed a gun at her and tied her to a table," Takeru said. "Scared the crap out of her, I'm sure. Most people aren't used to things like that, maybe...maybe we are. But to most people, that's probably the most terrifying moment of their lives."

"Okay, in that moment, maybe, but...you didn't hurt her at all. The moment passes, and...that's all it is. You were scared for a minute," Daisuke continued to casually claim. "And then a minute later you realize there was nothing to be scared of, and...okay, there."

"That's...that's not how it works," Takeru said. "W-whatever, whatever, uh...I seriously doubt a large tip is going to be the thing that breaks the dam."

"I still can't believe all this," Koushiro muttered. "There are millions of people in this city, thousands of people move in and out every year, and...we just had to run into the exact same witness twice." He shook his head. "We could pull a thousand jobs and I'd never expect that kind of bad luck."

"Alright, so, that's as taken care of as it's going to be," Takeru said. "So, move on. I'm all over her, it's not a problem."

"Well, there is some good news," Koushiro said, shrugging his backpack off, unzipping it, and reaching his right hand down into it. "I found a buyer in Musuk who seemed to be pretty desperate. He didn't buy a lot, but I was able to push a pretty good part of it out very quickly."

His hand emerged, holding a tall, round, clear plastic container completely filled with flat golden coins. He set it down on the countertop.

"He even melted them down and pressed them for us," Koushiro added. "I figured I'd give you guys something to start with." He pulled out a few identical containers and put them down on the counter. "I know tasting the fruit of one's labors is always sweet, so...here's a sample."

Takeru nodded. "Well, it's not all bad news." He picked one of the containers up in his right hand, looking it over.

"In a few weeks, we should have a lot more, just hold on," Koushiro said, tossing the backpack over his shoulder and onto his back. "We're all about to be very happy." He looked over at Takeru. "How do you feel about relocating?"

"I can't say I feel any way about it," Takeru answered. "Hard to have real feelings, you just sprung it on me."

"It helps if I can get some physical assets with all the money I'll have to be moving around," Koushiro explained. "Gives me more filters to run things through." He looked over at Daisuke. "Can't be Daisuke, he needs the garage. I don't want to move my gear. So...it's you or Ken, and Ken just got his apartment like four months ago. You've been there, what...three years?"

"Probably good to move around every now and then anyway," Takeru muttered.

"I've got a nice luxury condominium I'm gonna get you into," Koushiro said. "Beats the hell out of your current place, and you'll have enough room to start...storing stuff." He cleared his throat. "But, uh...I need you to do something for me."

"I don't like the way you're phrasing that," Takeru said. "But go ahead."

Koushiro glanced down at the floor. "Theodore Lunkin's going to be in town in six days, he needs to reassure some of his investors that live on the north side, and...he's gotta go. And, given recent events, we can do something about it instead of just sitting around and hoping someone else does."

Takeru's forehead furrowed. "He's gotta go?"

"I think you know he does," Koushiro insisted. "I know it's short notice, but...I think I know how we can do it, and it'd be a nice way to really put ourselves on the map to the right people." He rubbed his cheek. "Right now, we just look like we're in this for ourselves, trying to enrich ourselves, but...this, this is how we make a splash."

"And...you want me to do it, because I've killed someone before, so I'm used to it?" Takeru said dryly.

"I mean...that's a piece of it," Koushiro granted.

"Yeah, well, it's not like I enjoyed it," Takeru said, scowling slightly. "In fact, let me lay this out clearly, so, if you happen to think that's the case—"

"You're also the only one with extensive experience using long-range weaponry, so...I mean, that's far bigger a consideration to me," Koushiro said defensively. "This is going to have to be a long distance job. I don't think you...I don't think you enjoy killing people."

"Well, I don't," Takeru re-iterated. "Either way...that's quite something you're asking of me."

"This is Theodore Lunkin we're talking about here," Koushiro reminded him. "This is a domino worth knocking over, and the dominoes that fall after him could be really meaningful too. This guy is one of the major donors to the big five northeast academies, and he's definitely not just doing it because he cares about kids getting the best possible education. That's just one of multiple things I could mention."

"Yeah, I know what he does," Takeru insisted. "Still, though, it's just...it's a lot. Regardless of a person deserving it or not, it's...it's a big deal." He took in a deep breath, then pushed it out. "Yeah. Yeah I'll do it. Just...just needed to get in the right frame of mind."

Daisuke clapped Takeru on the back. "This is what we've been fighting for, an opportunity to do something like this. I know it's...I know it's a difficult thing to do, but...if we don't follow through, then we're just thieves."

Takeru nodded. "Yeah. Yeah, I'll take care of it."

OOO

"I mean, I _did_ do a good job serving him," Hikari mused, holding the handful of paper bills in her hands. "Probably better than average. It was slow, I spent more time with him then I usually do."

"You're trying to attribute that tip to the quality of your service?" Lily said, jumping up slightly and landing on the bed on her knees, staring over at her friend. "Sweetie, that's...that's never going to add up. Not unless you blew him under the table."

Hikari, sitting up against her bed pillow, rolled her eyes. "Can you not be obscene?"

"No," Lily said. "I have to be, I literally can't help it. Actually…" she thought for a moment, fingers ticking up from her right fist. "You would have had to do it...at least three times, probably four, to justify that much—"

"J-just stop!" Hikari protested. "Just...no, no, but...I mean...what was it?"

"There are people out there who just have money to throw around randomly," Lily said. "Like, it doesn't mean anything to them, a few hundred units just looks like spare change to them."

"Yeah, but why are those people having dinner at Fuku Bistro?" Hikari asked. "We've never gotten that sort of clientele, for good reason. They just go five blocks north and find five-star joints where they can pay seventy units for a bowl of soup."

"Tourist? Doesn't know any better?" Lily suggested. "Sees a restaurant being staffed by a bunch of beautiful young women in short skirts and thinks that's obviously a place for the wealthy?"

"Nah...either way, he was way too nice to me to be a rich guy," Hikari muttered.

Lily squinted for a moment. "Look at all the bills. See if he wrote anything on them."

Hikari blinked a couple times, then her eyes darted down to the bills. Quickly, she shuffled through them, flipping each of them around, quickly finding each of them to be free of any unexpected ink. She shook her head. "Nope."

"Hm." Lily rubbed at her chin. "Well, if I had to guess, I would say...keep an eye open for this guy over the next couple weeks. Because I can only assume he's going to be back."

Hikari set the money down on the dresser to her right. "As in...back for me?" She grimaced. "Well, maybe I just don't get out enough, but...that doesn't seem like something that ever happens."

"What do you mean?" Lily asked.

"I mean, a guy with so much money that he doesn't think anything about dropping nearly seven hundred units on a fifteen dollar meal doesn't set his sights on a woman who wears a schoolgirl outfit to extract extra units from horny men so I can pay my rent on time," Hikari explained. "You know, we all stay in our lanes, that's how it works."

Lily shrugged. "Maybe you're one of the rare, lucky ones."

"Or maybe he's just an eccentric and I'll never see him again," Hikari sighed. "Maybe some wacko who snuck out of the mental hospital with someone's wallet and found himself running into my restaurant." She rolled her eyes. "For all I know I'm lucky he didn't take his pants off."

"He looked way too put-together for that," Lily chided, sliding her knees off of the bed and landing on her feet. "Now, Miss High Roller, let's get out of here and put those bills to use somewhere more appropriate than the top of your dresser."

Hikari was about to go through the rote process of gently declining and talking about needing to study her instructional packets for her instructor tests. She opened her mouth, but suddenly held back the words.

She thought for a moment, eyes flittering around her apartment, quickly going around the walls of the small room.

"Y-yeah...I...I think I agree," Hikari said, rocking her weight back a bit and then throwing her body forward off the bed, landing on her feet at the side of the bed. "Yeah, that sounds...let's do it."

Lily looked surprised as Hikari rocketed to her feet. "...really?"

"Yeah! Yeah, let's go," Hikari said, going over to her closet and pulling the sliding doors open. "Uh...what do you have in mind?"

OOO

Takeru wrapped his knuckles on the steel door a few times, glancing over his shoulder immediately after doing so. There was still nobody at the top of the set of steps Takeru had descended to get to the imposing, grey door. There was no particular reason for anyone to be. Just a small path between buildings that wasn't even a proper shortcut to anything of use, existing only so the drug store had a back entrance for deliveries.

Well, it needed a back entrance for another reason as well.

A metal slat in the door slid to the left, revealing a small square open space in the center of the steel. A pair of eyes took only a moment to look at Takeru, then the slat zipped shut again. The entire door then slid to the left, revealing a dark room filled mostly with cardboard boxes.

"Every time I come here, I'm expecting to find bluesuits raiding it," Takeru muttered, stepping in and looking around. "Always ready to just keep walking past, like I got lost on the way to the gym or something."

"I'm too good for that," Jou replied, sliding the door shut behind Takeru. "I'd be far more worried about you getting caught. You're the one out there, doing things, making the news." Jou smacked at Takeru's chest with the back of his right hand. "What was up with that profile they released, that was you, right? How'd they get all that? I didn't see it until this morning, but...that was totally you, right?"

"I'm working on that," Takeru grumbled. "But for the moment, I'm clear."

"You need more money already?" Jou asked. "You were just here...what, a couple days ago?"

Takeru pulled a small canister of gold coins from his pocket, the clear plastic casing that Koushiro had delivered them in. "Sometimes it goes a little faster than you expect." He pulled the top off the canister and poured the large coins into his hand. "And there's more."

Jou carefully opened one of the cardboard boxes to his immediate right, revealing a collection of filled black garbage bags. He pulled one of them out and opened it, showing the contents to Takeru. "Do tell."

Takeru peered down at the bag's contents, a loose collection of paper bills representing money. He bent down slightly to peer closer at them. "Too clean," he said. "Don't try to get me to take from the sucker bag, come on man, those bills are too neat and new."

Jou smirked, closing the bag back up. "Just wanted to make sure you hadn't lost your edge."

"I'll bet you haven't even dragged those through dirt yet," Takeru chided. "You're trying to get people to take that? Shame on you."

"Okay, okay." Jou got a different bag out, opening it and showing it to Takeru. Takeru nodded.

"Anyway, I'll do fifteen hundred units, and I need some equipment," Takeru said. "I need a sniper rifle."

"Oh ho!" Jou cried, reaching into the bag and coming up with a fistful of crumpled bills. He began counting them out, shedding a few back into the bag. "Okay, now you're starting to get serious! Wow, sniper rifle, okay."

"You can help?" Takeru asked.

"Of course I can," Jou replied, holding a messy handful of bills out towards Takeru. "First, I'd just like to reiterate my dedication to supplying my customers with untracked bills that will never cast suspicion on the spender."

"Yeah, yeah," Takeru said, taking the money from Jou's hand.

"And, should you find these qualities lacking, you may take it up with me at any time," Jou added.

"Yeah, I will," Takeru mumbled. "Ten years later after I get out of prison and you've moved eight thousand kilometers away."

"Hey, you're the one guy I do business with who actually knows my name," Jou protested. "If there's anyone I wouldn't screw over like that, it's you. Alright, Tigrenav Rifle, coming up," Jou said, weaving in-between rows of boxes towards the further wall of the room.

"Not enough," Takeru said. "Tigrenav's don't have the range. I need range."

"L.D.S.S. 500, then?" Jou suggested, opening one of the boxes and peering inside before closing it.

"Punsho A10," Takeru countered. "I need the extra punch too."

"Well, that's gonna run you quite a bit," Jou said. "But yeah, I've got one of those."

Takeru held his hand with half a dozen gold coins in it over towards him. "Don't worry, I've got it covered."

He nodded. "Won't even bother asking what you've got planned for this," he said, pulling a box down off the top of a pile to get to the one beneath it. "I don't want to know, actually."

"If you pay attention, you'll know in a few days," Takeru said, watching Jou pull a long, thin, black briefcase from one of the boxes.

"Alright, this one's gonna cost you six, but as long as you take care of it you'll never need another long distance firearm." Jou set the case on the ground.

"Alright, I'll...I'll take a look at it before I leave," Takeru said as Jou made to pop the case open. "Can I see him?"

"O-oh, yeah," Jou said, standing back up, leaving the case closed. "Uh...you wanna see him? He's...he was in pretty good shape when I left, we could do that."

Takeru nodded. "I, uh...I could use some additional motivation for what's about to happen, so...may as well." He nodded. "Yeah."

OOO

Hikari pulled her left sock up her leg as far as it could stretch, bringing it up just shy of her knee. "Maybe if he just got a freaking life he wouldn't feel the need to occupy himself with nitpicking about our uniform standards."

"Does...does he actually think girls who don't have their socks pulled up all the way in academy get whacked with a ruler?" Lily asked, scratching the side of her head. "Or was that his attempt to be funny?"

Hikari rolled her eyes, straightening out her blouse. "I'm betting the Bikini Bistro by the waterfront doesn't have to deal with so many outfit regulations."

"Yeah, because there's barely any outfit to regulate," Lily said under her breath. "Alright, come on, don't let it get to you. It's the slow part of the day, you shouldn't be increasing your stress levels right now."

Hikari huffed out a deep breath, and took a step back out towards the main room of the restaurant. No sooner had she taken this step then she jumped back into the small hallway, nearly bumping into Lily. She pressed her back into the hallway, as if she was hiding.

"Let me guess, the bald Sohokvian guy?" Lily said. "If he tries to touch your thigh again, start screaming, this time we'll get the police involved."

Hikari shook her head. "N-no, not...not that. Uh, table seven, my...my benefactor."

"Back already?" Lily gasped, peering past her, sticking her head out into the room for a brief moment before ducking back. "Been what, a week?"

Hikari took in a deep breath. "Yeah, uh...okay, didn't really prepare for how to deal with this."

"I'd start by going out there and taking his order," Lily suggested. "I mean, he's a customer, so that part definitely has to happen at some point."

Hikari grimaced. "Should I...should I ask?"

Lily shrugged. "I don't have experience with handsome strangers giving me large sums of money for no reason."

Hikari nodded. "Alright, well...t-this can't be bad news."

With a nod, she turned and walked out into the room, heading straight for table seven, glancing around briefly to acknowledge her other responsibilities in the restaurant.

"Why, good afternoon, sir," she said cheerfully, coming to a stop in front of the table, drawing his attention and gaze. "Welcome back."

TK's face wrinkled slightly. "Sir, sir, sir...so not me, don't tell me you've already forgotten my name."

Hikari smiled. "Oh, how could I forget. I serve a hundred people a day in here, one guy mentions his initials, may as well be branded on the back of my brain." She nodded. "You consider yourself especially memorable a person?"

She would certainly be reprimanded if her manager overheard her talking like this to a customer, but she felt strangely comfortable and safe using a bit of repartee with this particular one. And playing along with him seemed like the best way to get answers out of him.

"Well, you clearly recall me," TK pointed out.

"Alright...TK...maybe I do," Hikari admitted, absentmindedly clasping her hands together behind her back.

"Oh, you do remember!" TK proclaimed. "Do you remember what I had? Because I feel like playing it safe and going with that again."

Hikari nodded, then leaned forward slightly towards him, putting her knuckles down on the table. "Alright, TK, we can certainly do that. Now...I'm sure you know that you weren't coming back in here without getting hit with some questions." She lowered her voice a bit. "And I've played along for a minute here, but...it's been bugging me for the last week now, I gotta know, how was I worth over six hundred units to you?"

TK gave a playful smile. "Yes, you...you no doubt have some questions." He glanced around. "But you also have other tables to wait, one of which plays host to a middle-aged woman who got here before I did and is no doubt about to verbalize to the manager how very unfair she finds all this, and nobody wants that." He tilted his head over to the left.

Hikari wanted to protest, but he had a very good point, and she was in no mood to earn an actually deserved scolding. "This isn't over," she muttered.

"I'm not going anywhere," TK said, Hikari quickly sliding over to her right, eager to suppress any potential manager complaints.

OOO

"Do I really look like a guy with a plan?" Takeru asked, setting his spoon back into his soup bowl.

"Honestly...yes," Hikari said, thinking about it for only a half-second. "More so than almost anyone else I know, between the...tailored suit jacket and pants, extensive conversational skills, and seemingly large supply of money."

"Well, get to know me a little better, see how you feel then," TK muttered. "Maybe I...I just hate doing math, you know? Calculating tip percentage, it's...it was honestly easier for me to just toss what I had down."

Hikari frowned. "Is that the best you can do?"

Takeru smirked, glancing over to the side. "Alright, well...try not to take this the wrong way." He cleared his throat. "I just...you know. I looked at you, I made some assumptions. I looked at me, didn't have to make any assumptions there. And...you know, I figured...you needed it more than me." He shrugged.

Hikari paused for a moment, then gave a small nod. "Well, that's definitely true."

"So, I thought, why not?" Takeru added. "Alright, the table behind me is about to get very frustrated that their refill on soda and fries haven't gotten there yet."

Hikari quickly rounded Takeru, going around his table to attend to her other duties. Takeru watched her depart, then turned back to his sandwich, thinking.

"Hm," Takeru muttered. "Gotta say, she...she's not afraid to tango." He shrugged. "Impressive."

"You're at least thirty years too young to be in a place like this, shame on you."

Takeru jumped a bit as he looked up, Ken inviting himself into the seat on the other side of the small table. "O-oh, you didn't have to come in," he began.

"Oh, and miss a chance to watch the wolf go on the hunt?" Ken replied dryly. "Not in a million years." He looked around the bistro. "Man, I might have to throw these pants away when I get home, I can _feel_ the horny, middle-aged man sweat in the chair cushion."

"Hey, nothing wrong with a fuku joint," Takeru protested. "Pretty young women need to make ends meet, they're a couple years away from getting a real career going, and they're not willing to go all out and prostitute themselves or dance on a pole...it's nice middle ground. Keep your dignity while using your good genes to make money and entertain lonely middle-aged men."

Ken smirked. "I like the bikini places better, if that's the argument."

Takeru's nose wrinkled. "A little too...on-the-nose for me."

"Man," Ken thought to himself. "How easily could we rack em up in a place like this, if we wanted to? Fish in a barrel doesn't even do it justice." He reached over and grabbed Takeru's bowl of soup from the plate in front of him, pulling it over in front of him. "Either one of us, in an hour, could get every last waitress here to come home with us. At the same time."

Takeru nodded. "Not even a challenge."

"The pink-haired one serving that couple in the back right corner keeps looking over at us," Ken remarked. "She's not even working on our half of the room and we've got her on a string." He looked over at Takeru. "Cute, don't you think?"

"Hey, any woman who dyes their hair an exotic color is a woman I'm going to just assume likes to have fun," Takeru acknowledged. "But, my goal is a little more focused right now–"

He looked down, finding his bowl of soup gone, then found it having been hijacked by Ken, who was now scooping spoonfuls of it into his mouth. Silently, he stared at Ken for several moments.

"Oh, sorry, was this yours?" Ken asked.

Takeru's eyes narrowed at his friend.

"Okay, you can have it back," Ken offered, pushing the bowl back over towards Takeru.

Takeru turned away, looking over towards the far wall of the restaurant. "I don't want it anymore," he hissed.

"Whatever," Ken said nonchalantly. At that moment, Hikari returned to the table, stopping short at the sight of a blue-haired young man sitting across from Takeru this time.

"O-oh...I...hello," she babbled out, thrown by the unexpected addition.

"Hello?" Takeru repeated. "He's been here the whole time, you must have not noticed him because you were lost in my eyes," he joked. Hikari blinked rapidly a few times, blushing. "He won't be staying for dinner, he's just picking me up."

Hikari nodded rapidly, turning her attention back to Takeru. "O-okay."

"You did great," Takeru told her. "I'd like to see you again. Soon, actually."

"Um...I'm here six days a week, ten to nine," Hikari said. "Just ask to be sat in my section, if you keep coming around this time you won't have a problem."

"No no, I mean I, I'd like to see _you_ again," Takeru said. "Not...not this place, you. You get off at nine, wow, that's...I mean, I can make it work." He nodded to himself. "So–"

"Yes!" Hikari said, popping up onto her tiptoes as she spoke, then suddenly settling back down and retracting a bit, as if the outburst was uncontrolled. "U-uh…"

Takeru pursed his lips. "Alright, how about...tomorrow night? I'll come by here at nine, pick you up, we'll take a walk by the pier?"

Hikari was quick to nod, but Takeru immediately waved his right hand in front of his face. "What am I saying? You're walking around here all day between tables, and I'm gonna have you walk around the pier? Um…" he snapped his fingers together. "You can rent those...motorized carts down there, great. Sound good?"

Hikari nodded again. "Yeah," she said. "Okay. Tomorrow."

Takeru pulled a handful of units from his inside jacket pocket and tossed it absentmindedly onto the table. "Ten, I'll be here." He stood up, which drew Ken upright as well. "Looking forward to it."

Leaving her standing there, clearly stunned by the suddenly whirlwind of events, Takeru turned towards the main doors of the restaurant, Ken trailing behind him.

OOO

Takeru popped open the long black briefcase, revealing an approximately meter-long rifle inside within a cushioned interior. Ken bent down to look the impressive piece of weaponry over, running his palm over the barrel.

"The Punsho A10," Ken said quietly. "Wow."

"Jou gets the good stuff," Takeru agreed.

The small apartment room looked abandoned, with the dilapidated state of the wallpaper and lack of furniture, leaving a stripped-bare room that had no personality to speak of, but was simply neglected while nobody was renting it out. A series of failed attempts at small businesses in the area meant the housing accommodations were overkill, which left many floors of apartments vacated and ignored. Takeru and Ken had found one of these empty rooms, having no shortage of ones to pick from, and were standing in front of the window that looked down onto the six-lane street below.

"You know, that model is overkill for this shot, actually. If we have it right," Ken muttered. "It's actually a pretty routine shot."

"Yeah, but I'll never need another sniper rifle again with this," Takeru said, pulling the barrel from the case and snapping a two-legged stand on the bottom of it. "Any long distance shot, this thing can take it. Also, you don't need to whisper, there are like eight people total in this entire building."

Takeru screwed a small black cylinder onto the end of the rifle, Ken still marvelling at the weapon.

"You ever used one of these before?" Ken asked. "Back on the, the compound?"

Takeru gave a little laugh as he rammed a magazine into a slot on the bottom. "This? No, not...not a model like this. I got to use a Tunneler A8, which...I'll tell you, you can drive over that thing and it'll still work. Stiff though. Not like this. This is a luxury sports car, the Tunneler is just...it's a pickup truck."

"So, anyway, we've got a bit of time," Ken said, picking his head up to look out the window. "And I think we've done all we can to ensure success, so...what do you think of the girl?"

Takeru brought the assembled gun over towards the window, setting it down on the floor right in front of it. He reached up and undid the clasp holding the two glass and wood panes together. "You showing up distracted her and turned her into a bobblehead, but...she's actually got some real spirit. She can keep up in a conversation, she's got some real personality to her."

"Still, uh...still no idea, though?" Ken asked.

"Well, I can't ask her about that now," Takeru said. "Give me a few dates."

"She, uh...she sure was shocked when you asked," Ken thought aloud. "You were flirting, right?"

"Yes, I was," Takeru said, propping the legs of the rifle onto the windowsill, leaning it back so the barrel pointed up towards the ceiling. "You showing up and acting like that probably made her think I was gay."

Ken laughed. "Soup was pretty good, actually."

Takeru scowled, standing up straight to look down at the street. His eyes ran over to his right, looking down a block towards a gentleman's establishment across the street.

"She couldn't say yes fast enough," Ken added. "Like she thought you'd take it back if she didn't say immediately."

"Well, I'm not an opportunity to risk losing," Takeru said cheekily. "Especially for her." He pointed down at the floor. "This girl, I looked it up, she lives in an apartment smaller than this one."

"Yikes," Ken muttered. "What is her apartment, a coffin?"

"She probably feels like she won the lottery, last thing you want to do is mess around with the ticket," Takeru said. "Yeah, give me a couple weeks, she'll feel like she hit a jackpot alright." He cleared his throat. "She's, uh...gotta say, she's completely my type too."

"Whoa, don't take this too seriously, buddy," Ken said, holding his palm out towards him. "You're...you're here for information, right? Don't...don't get too deep into it."

"Yeah, but she is," Takeru continued to muse. "I like the...the brown hair. Not exactly long, but...clearly longer than mine, that's totally what I go for. Great legs too."

"Okay, okay, enough of that," Ken said. "Okay, purple rogga is being pulled up to the front by the valet. Make sure you nail this one."

Takeru quickly pulled the butt of the sniper rifle up, swiveling the barrel so it pointed down the street to his right. He shoved his eye up to the scope, finding the vanity performance car parking a few dozen feet away from the entrance.

"Make sure you hit this one, we'll never have an assassination anywhere near this easy after this one hits the news," Ken added.

With a couple clicks on the scope, Takeru was soon getting a magnified view of the front of the club, two large bouncers on either side of the entrance. He only had to wait in silence for a few moments for the doors to open, revealing a tall, well-built man with a pinstriped suit and slicked-back black hair.

"Good evening, mister Lunkin," Ken muttered under his breath.

Putting the billionaire in the crosshairs, Takeru squeezed the trigger back, seeing no point in waiting for him to take more than a couple steps out towards his car. With a dull thunk, muted by the added cylinder on the end of the weapon, the rifle discharged. Takeru waited only long enough to see Lunkin's head snap backwards and his forehead blossom open before quickly pulling the prized rifle back into the room. He glanced across the street at another scarcely populated apartment building, seeing several window blinds being erratically moved up and down, lights flickering on and off, and cacophonic pops sounding off from them at random. He knew a similar show of distraction was going on in other windows in the apartment building he was in.

"Holy shit," Ken breathed out hoarsely as Takeru began to disassemble the rifle. "Well, Takeru, buddy, isn't any going back now! We're in the game!"

Takeru could hear the panic begin to settle in on the pedestrians down below as they realized what had happened. He calmly unscrewed the cylinder on the tip, then began to pull apart the barrel.

"We're only in the game if we get out of here without getting caught," Takeru clarified. "Oh, and buddy?"

Ken, crouched down to stay out of the window, looked over at his friend.

"Just in case, as far as this girl is concerned...my name is TK."

"Yeahyeahyeah, we can talk about that when we're not minutes away from being cornered by cops," Ken said as Takeru put the components of the rifle back in the case and closed it up. "Okay, just in case those forensic folks are getting a little too smart for their own good…"

Ken reached into his inner jacket pocket and pulled out a small plastic bag full of hair. He dumped it out on the ground, then kicked it up, spreading it all around the room.

"Yeah, have fun trying to arrest half the city," Ken added as the two got up to leave.


	7. Work Life Balance

Chapter Six: Work Life Balance

"Oh, this is bad," Hikari moaned, slowly turning around and putting her palms down on the top of the vibrating laundry machine, pushing herself up so she was sitting atop the churning white cube. "This is...this is gonna suck."

"Oh, stop that," Lily chided, leaning up against the neighboring machine. "You got a date with a rich underwear model without even trying, there's nothing that sucks about that."

"Underwear model?" Hikari repeated, stretching her back out and looking up at the ceiling. "Where'd that come from? You didn't like...stalk this guy home last night, did you?"

"No, but...he looks like he could be, and that's the important part," she explained. "And you've clearly got something going for yourself that drew his attention, so...focus on that part. He came onto you, so...just be yourself."

"I'm going to go on a date immediately after a ten hour shift," Hikari muttered. "I'll be sweaty, I'll be tired, my legs and feet will be screaming at me, and I'll be with someone I barely know." She looked over at Lily. "So, as much as I'd love to be myself, it's going to be a bit of a challenge."

"It's just a pier date," Lily insisted. "Not much to it, just listen and try to be witty and clever."

She tapped her fingers on the top of the machine a few times. "Why...why oh why does this guy have interest in me? What did he see in me that made him want more?"

The two were just silent for a couple moments, Hikari letting the vibrations of the machine loosen her body up.

"Well, I can go get my red dress and iron it up real quick, freshen it up," Hikari muttered. "Oh, those heels are going to be hell to wear after my shift."

"He's taking you to the _pier_ ," Lily reiterated. "You're not going to the opera, why would you wear your best clothes? Don't be silly."

"I want to...I want to make a good first impression," Hikari said lamely. "I've got one set of nice, formal clothing, when else am I gonna wear it?"

"This guy already knows you're a waitress, don't sweat that," Lily said. "No point in trying to convince him you're something you're not."

She chewed on her bottom lip. "Yeah, I...I guess." She sighed. "Blouse, cardigan sweater, skirt, sandals? I guess."

She gently pushed herself off the machine and sat down on the floor. "Oh yeah, reminds me, I'm not gonna have time to do this later." She pulled a small, round, clear bottle with soft red paint inside out of her pocket. "If he's going to be able to see my toes, then…"

"Yeah, there you go," Lily said. Hikari delicately pulled the cap off the top of the bottle to reveal the small brush. "Give him something to look at."

"I mean, I can't say I know for sure, but...this guy, there's just...there's something about him that strikes me in a way that these other guys don't," Hikari said, beginning to brush the tiny brush on the top of her left big toenail. "He's just got more...he's more colorful, seems more interesting. I'm actually excited to see him again."

OOO

"I don't ride in cars very much," Hikari said, watching the buildings go past in the passenger-side window. "Been a little while, actually."

Takeru could see the spark of excitement in Hikari's eyes when he had pulled up in his car to pick her up. Sometimes, it was that simple base instinct that you had to play on to draw attention. It always worked, on some level, even if it didn't seem obvious or significant. A nice, shiny, expensive-looking car, a big wad of casually-spent units, form-fitting, slick-looking outfits, it all pointed to one thing. Security.

He was a man in control of his life. He had the resources to live his life in the way he wanted. He didn't have to worry about making it to the end of the week or the month. That's what all of that advertised. And any woman who had even the slightest fear concerning their own security was going to be pulled towards that. It never failed him.

"You know, a part of me was hoping you wouldn't have time to change out of that uniform," Takeru said playfully, slowly humming down the street. "It was the first thing that caught my eye with you, you...you look really fantastic in it."

Hikari's feet tapped up and down rapidly against the floor of the car. "Thank you. You look good in your...uh, your clothes too."

Takeru gave a small laugh. "So, anything exciting at the Bistro today?"

"Oh, don't ask that, nothing...nothing ever happens there that you could even remotely qualify as exciting," Hikari said quickly. "I would never do something so cruel as subject someone to tales from Fuku Bistro."

"Oh, so nothing fun happens behind the curtain there?" Takeru asked. "I wouldn't have guessed that. Bunch of young, beautiful women wearing academy uniforms, and nothing exciting happens?"

Hikari pitched forward a bit, laughing to herself. "Oh, no, you...you might be misjudging the workplace environment. Yeah, everyone there just wants to clock in, clock out, and get paid." She pursed her lips. "It's just a job."

"But you all just seem so...cheerful and happy," Takeru mused. "Smiles everywhere you look."

"Oh, yeah, it's...it's part of the job to look cheerful," Hikari said. "At the risk of giving away the secrets of Fuku Bistro and shattering the illusion, yeah...behind every grin is a mind tortured with fears of not making it to the next payday." She looked over at Takeru. "I'm much more interested in you. You're the mystery here. You're the one who doesn't belong."

"Oh, I don't belong?" Takeru repeated, easing the car into a stall right by the sidewalk that separated the road from the beach down below. "Well, that's just insensitive, whatever could you mean by that?"

"No, no, it's...trust me, it's a compliment," Hikari said quickly. "I...oh, man." She rubbed her forehead. "Why did I say that?"

"No, go ahead," Takeru encouraged, popping open the driver side door and sliding out. "If it's a compliment, I mean."

He whipped the door shut, then came around to the other side of his car, giving Hikari a chance to gather herself. He pulled her side open, beckoning towards her, holding his right hand out towards her.

"Go on, where do I not belong?" Takeru asked as Hikari took his hand and used it to lift herself out of the seat.

"Uh...amongst the rabble?" Hikari settled on. "In cheesy restaurants trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator?" She looked around, the walkway stretching on well into the dark in both directions. "Going on dates with a member of the Proletariat? And that's just off the top of my head."

"Where should I be?" Takeru asked playfully, shutting the door behind Hikari and looking over at a row of four-wheeled vehicles lined up against the fence on the far side of the walkway. He wrapped his right arm around her shoulders and began to gently guide her towards these small carts.

"Uh...sitting at the end of a giant dining table in a Hebian-era manor out in the country, eating caviar while a butler and maid watch, and Princesses and Heiresses line up outside your window trying to vy for your attention," Hikari said. "Something like that, maybe. I don't know what rich people actually do."

Takeru laughed. "You might have the wrong idea about me." He pulled some bills from his inner jacket pocket and began feeding them into a slot in one of the fence posts next to the carts.

"Gonna make me guess?" Hikari said as Takeru fed the paper money into the machine. "Well, fine then, I guess that's half the fun." She sighed as the lock on the cart disengaged, then rolled out a couple feet from the fence. "I ruled out oil money, you don't have the complexion for it, and your English is too good." She gratefully fell heavily into the right-side seat of the two-seat cart, Takeru taking up a spot to her left. "You don't feel like a banker, either. Too smooth for that, too much fun to talk to."

"Stroll," Takeru said, pushing a button on the center console of the cart. On command, the wheeled vehicle began to putter slowly down the walkway, headed towards the north. "Where do you get these stereotypes, exactly?" 

Hikari shrugged. "I read. Sometimes." She blinked up at him a couple times. "So my first shot would be real estate." She swallowed down. "Just feels right. I feel like it was your father that broke through, you're second generation wealth."

"Okay, that was actually fun, but I'm not mean enough to make you chase a phantom carrot," Takeru said, looking out on the water to his right. He leaned forward and pushed the button again. "Take us down the pier when we get there," he ordered.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Hikari asked.

"My father was military," Takeru answered. "Sergeant First Class, weapon specialist, three tours of duty, two in Lydia and one in Contral."

Hikari's forehead furrowed. "Well, I could have guessed all night and not gotten there," she admitted. "But—"

"On the third tour, he got carpet bombed by his own air support unit when they misunderstood his request," Takeru said, grimacing. "The insurance policy for something like that is obscene."

"O-oh," Hikari said quietly, face immediately dropping.

Takeru looked out again towards the water. "After that, my mom decided to try and put her degree to use after I was old enough, went into journalism. Decided to do something hard-hitting, went into one of those ghettos on the south end of York City, never came out." He shrugged. "Who knows where she is now."

"Oh, my God," Hikari mumbled. "That's awful."

"So dumb, why would you...why would you do that when you've got kids?" Takeru muttered. "I was only fifteen." He cleared his throat. "Anyway, the government shoveled another trunk of money at me and my brother, like that's supposed to make it better or something."

"Wow," Hikari breathed.

Takeru reached up and rubbed his eyes. "God, what am I doing, why am I...bringing stuff like this up on a first date, what's wrong with me?"

"Nono, don't...don't worry about that," Hikari said. "I mean, you had to say that if you wanted to explain...you know."

"So, that's a pretty solid foundation to build on," Takeru continued. "And now I'm in computers, which is pretty lucrative if you know the right buttons to push."

The cart made a right turn, going onto a wooden dock that extended out onto the beach and past the water line.

"So, sorry to potentially disappoint, but...no real estate tycoons or bankers or kings of small sovereign nations in my family tree," Takeru said. "Nothing bourgeoisie over here."

"I'm so sorry," Hikari said, resting her head in her palm, elbow propped up on the armrest of the cart. "I...I'm a complete idiot, assuming stuff like that, saying some of those things, I made it...made it sound like a bad thing."

"What are you talking about?" Takeru asked.

"I...sorry, I can't help it. People like me, we're just...raised to resent rich people, see them as...as if they belong to a different species, they're so different from the rest of us." She squeezed her eyes shut. "I probably made it sound like I resent you, which...ridiculous. You've been nothing but nice to me, you gave me a week's salary just because, you asked me out…"

"You know why you said those things?" Takeru asked. Hikari turned back towards him, confused. "Because you know how to riff. You know how to have fun." He shrugged. "That's all there is to it. And that, that is something that gets more and more rare with each passing day."

"Huh?" Hikari said, reaching up to scratch one of her bangs out of her face.

"You land a date with a guy you barely know, but you assume he comes from some pretty serious money. A lot of people, plenty of women, they'd get a stick up their butt, go into full formal mode, carefully measure everything, try to act like they're something that they're not. Others would go full passive, capitulate to everything, just try to nod and look pretty, try to appeal to my...most basic of instincts. But you decided to just be yourself. You decided to have fun."

"W-well…" Hikari mumbled.

"You lose _that_ , I would be upset about that," Takeru added. "So don't you dare do that." He raised an eyebrow at her. "I went to your restaurant wearing a suit that was probably worth more than the clothes of your next hundred customers combined, I paid the cost of a new laptop computer for a turkey sandwich and soup, if that's...if that's not worth making fun of at least a little bit, then what is?"

The cart came to the end of the pier. Takeru reached forward to tap the button. "Stop here," he said. The cart wheeled to a halt and Takeru stood up.

"W-well...okay then," Hikari said as Takeru extended his hand out towards her. She reached up, wrapping her right hand's fingers around his hand and pulling herself into a standing position.

"Frankly, I can't say I blame you for resenting rich people, with the way the world is set up right now," Takeru said, guiding her over towards the very end of the pier, Hikari moving gingerly on tired and worn legs. "I didn't say all that to make you feel bad. Just wanted to let you know where I come from."

He leaned up against the fence on the end of the pier, looking down at the ocean beneath them. The wooden dock moved ever so slightly, the fluctuating water level pushing the structure around a few inches in all directions. Hikari gently lifted herself up a bit and placed her rear on the top of the fence, turning to face back towards the beach, using the barrier as a makeshift seat.

"You doing okay?" Takeru asked. "I've never worked a shift as a waiter before, but...I can imagine what it must feel like when you're done."

"Oh, I'm fine," Hikari said dismissively. "I'm just...I'm a drama queen sometimes. I do it six days a week, ten hours a day, I'm more than used to it by now...I just wince and shuffle a bit so people feel bad for me."

Takeru raised an eyebrow. "Six days a...sixty hours a week?" His nose wrinkled. "Wow, that's...yeah, never had one of those either. Wow."

She gave a small smile. "It's my choice. Had to beg my manager for it. Needed the extra money to make things work."

"Hm," Takeru grunted. "Hope it's worth it. That sounds brutal."

"It is," Hikari agreed, crossing her right leg over her left. "But I really wanted a cat, and the small kitchen was a must-have. My mom spent all those hours teaching me how to cook, I didn't want to get out of practice." She nodded. "And the reading packets I get for the instructor tests, it all adds up."

Takeru's face puckered ever so slightly. "You have to work sixty hour weeks so you can afford a cat, a mini-kitchen, and reading packets?"

"W-well..they're special reading packets," Hikari justified. "Specially designed to pass instructor acceptance tests."

"So it wasn't your choice," Takeru said. "Not really. At least, not as far as I'm concerned." He leaned forward, resting his forearm on the fence. "You're forced into working grueling hours so you can afford to have any sort of life outside work, I don't call that a choice."

She shrugged. "My friend gets by fine with fifty hours. I could have chosen that if I really wanted to."

"I'd object to fifty hours being considered any kind of a light load," Takeru murmured. "It's not like your hobby is having rare designer dresses imported from Ubtrusku or refurbishing vintage automobiles. You wanna cook and have a pet." He rolled his eyes.

"Bill 48-G," Hikari replied. "I didn't vote for it, don't blame me."

Takeru's eyebrow raised a fraction. "Oh, a woman who pays attention to the ballot. More rare than you might think, I like that."

"You'd pay attention too if it was affecting your take home like that," Hikari lamented. "That one still hurts."

"I say it isn't right," Takeru said. "Sixty hours a week." He grimaced, thinking for a moment. "You're a trooper though, fighting through it."

"Thank you," Hikari acknowledged. "It's...it's nothing compared to what you've had to deal with. Seriously."

"Hm," Takeru grunted, peering over the edge of the dock fence. "You should be careful up on that fence, you know."

"Huh?" Hikari asked, turning towards him.

"I mean, that water's freezing, and it's a bit of a drop down. If you fell, I _would_ jump in to save you, but I'd be pretty unhappy about it, and you'd owe me bigtime for it, and I wouldn't let you forget it," Takeru said teasingly. "So, point is, don't fall over."

"Please," Hikari said dismissively. "If I fell over, I'd just sink myself and drown out of shame." She pointed her thumb at her chest. "Two-time captain of the Brighton Academy girls gymnastics team. Not on my worst day would I fall off a beam."

Takeru laughed. "That's good. I like that."

"I've got a meter-tall trophy behind a locked pane of glass in the gymnasium at Brighton to back me up on that," Hikari added, suddenly sounding much more relaxed and comfortable. She looked around, finding the dock to be vacated outside of the two of them. Then, she grabbed the wooden beam of the fence to her right in both hands. She quickly rotated her body up and spun it around, her arms supporting her thin, small frame as she went into a handstand on the fence.

"Oh, there we go—" Takeru marveled as Hikari's body went upside down, but within a second her pastel red skirt fell victim to gravity and flipped up.

"Ahh!" Hikari yelped, quickly swinging her body down when she realized what was happening, in a panic swinging out towards the other side of the fence.

Takeru's hand immediately lashed out to grab her wrist as she came down on the other side, keeping her from losing grip of the beam and falling to the water below. With an ooph of exhalation, her body hit the other side of the fence, Takeru keeping his grip tight.

Hikari gave an annoyed groan, and a second later a distinctive splash could be heard down below. Takeru leaned over to look, seeing the ripples in the water below amidst the small waves, but unclear on the particulars of the source until he realized Hikari's sandals were gone.

"Yeah...didn't think that one through," Hikari muttered, face bright red and grim, looking like she had half a mind to just let herself fall into the water below so she could get away from the humiliation as quickly as possible.

Takeru chuckled a few times, then pulled her over the fence before that half a mind took over entirely. Hikari's body felt limp as he brought her over the beam.

"That's...that's what I get for being extemporaneous," Hikari grumbled, still cherry red in the face and averting her gaze from Takeru's face.

Takeru gave a mock sigh, then walked over towards the cart, still carrying Hikari bridal style. He set her back down in her seat, then began to shrug off his suit jacket. Hikari immediately stopped looking crestfallen, eyes widening in clear confusion as Takeru handed her his jacket.

"W-what are you doing?" Hikari asked immediately, looking at the jacket dimly, not reaching forward to take it.

"Hey, I said I'd jump in to save you," Takeru reminded her. "So I'm obligated to do the same for your shoes, it's basically the same thing, right?"

"No no no NO!" Hikari yelped, pushing the jacket back towards Takeru, then standing up and grabbing the sleeve of his undershirt. "You are NOT jumping in the ocean to get my shoes!" She tugged him towards her. "No!"

Takeru shrugged. "I have to. I said I'd do it for you, if I don't do it for your shoes, their feelings will be hurt."

"No, you're not doing that!" Hikari reiterated, grabbing the suit jacket and tossing it on top of Takeru's head. "You're...I'm not letting you do that!"

Takeru pulled his jacket straight and put it back on his shoulders. "I could see it in your expression when I pulled you up, you're going to miss those shoes, aren't you? You want them back."

"T-that's not the point!" Hikari said hesitantly. "I'm not having you jump into the ocean because I'm an idiot who does things without thinking." She sighed. "That's not fair." She sat back down in the seat.

"Then I guess I'm driving you over to Louboutin's and buying you new shoes," Takeru said, going over towards a large vending machine a few steps to his left. "It's your lucky day, I've never shopped for women's shoes before and have absolutely no frame of reference for how much they should cost, so you can get the most expensive pair in the whole store and I'll have no way of knowing."

Hikari shook her head. "No, no, you're not doing that either, I...I deserve it for being dumb." She gave a small mournful look. "I deserve it."

Takeru tapped a few buttons on the front of the machine, then slid a few bills into a slot on the front. After that, he went back over to the end of the pier, peering down, squinting. "Actually, I think the waves are pushing them in towards the shore, we could just go get them."

"Oh...it's not a big deal," Hikari said quietly, clearly demurred compared to a minute ago.

"No no, it'll be really easy," Takeru insisted. "Just drive the cart down, they might already have washed up by now. Either we get them, or a beach bum wandering the shore tomorrow morning does."

Hikari grimaced. "...if you don't mind."

"Course not," Takeru said, going back over to the vending machine and grabbing a steaming paper cup from one of the gaps in the front of the machine. He brought it over to the cart, handing it to Hikari. Hikari quickly reached up to take it, and Takeru took his seat.

"Thank you," Hikari mumbled, still clearly a bit shaken. "Oy, of course I'd...ugh." She furtively sipped from the cup, then placed it in a cupholder and folded her arms over her chest.

"Hey, don't worry," Takeru assured her. "Not a big deal at all, nothing to it."

"Well, Lily would be proud," Hikari muttered, putting her right hand up to her face and covering it, still visibly embarrassed. "A guy saw my panties on the first date, she'd applaud me for that one."

"I didn't see anything," Takeru immediately insisted, flicking a switch on the center console labeled 'MANUAL' and grabbing the joystick on the left-side armrest. He spun the cart around and began driving it back towards land. "Not a thing."

"R-really?" Hikari asked, peeking through her fingers over at Takeru.

"Yeah!" Takeru insisted. "I mean, if you gave me three guesses what color your panties are, I _might_ be able to get it, but…"

Hikari groaned, slumping over a bit in the seat. Takeru quickly reached over and wrapped his arm around her shoulders.

"Sorry, sorry, that was mean," Takeru was, chuckling a bit between words. "Sorry."

"No, it was funny," Hikari admitted. "I just...I can't believe I did that."

"Hey, at least you didn't actually fall in," Takeru reminded her. "That's something."

He steered the cart past a few people, almost back to the concrete walkway.

"Although...if you had, I could have looked like a _real_ hero just now. Leaping into the water after you, soaking my designer threads, pulling you to the shore...maybe some CPR," he suggested. "That wouldn't have been a bad impression to leave on you for our first date."

"I know how to swim," Hikari said quietly, nevertheless looking amused, peering back over at Takeru again.

"I wouldn't have known that," Takeru said. "Would have jumped in. You still would have owed me."

Hikari rolled her eyes, Takeru guiding the cart around the right side of the pier, going down to the beach level and rolling down the sandy incline towards the water.

"So, anyway...somewhere back there, you said something about reading packets, what's...what's that about? What are you reading about?" Takeru decided it was time to get her talking about something else.

"O-oh, I...I'm working on getting a certification," Hikari explained. "Instructor certification, I want to...I want to be a pre-academy instructor. I'm working towards that."

"Oh. Oh! Wow, that's...that's really cool," Takeru enthused. "Pre-academy instructor, awesome."

"Is it?" Hikari asked. "I've had more than one person tell me it's a bad idea." She lifted her head up a bit, looking at the darkening waterline, trying to find her sandals.

"And why would someone say something like that?" Takeru asked, similarly trying to find the out-of-place objects on the sand by the wooden pillars that held the pier up.

"Oh...less kids. Declining birthrate, been going on for a couple decades now. Every year, less births, less kids being brought up in decent conditions. Means less need for instructors, harder to get into, more likely to find yourself out of a job with no recourse." Hikari suddenly pointed down at the base of one of the pillars, just by the current waterline. "I see one of them!"

Takeru quickly pushed the cart over a few meters from where Hikari's eyes had indeed caught a glimpse of one of the strapped shoes. He stood up, but Hikari threw her arm up in front of him.

"No, I can at least do this part," Hikari said, stepping off the cart, bare feet sinking into the sand. She skipped over to the pillar, picking up the shoe and violently shaking salt water from it.

"See the other one?" Takeru asked, looking around.

"Uh…" Hikari looked around. The tiny wave lapped at her toes, sending a chill through her body. She looked up, finally spotting it bobbing just a few meters out. "Got it."

"Could just wait for it to come in," Takeru suggested. But Hikari had already stomped out into the water, getting knee-deep in the icy-cold ocean before grabbing her momentarily lost possession.

"Alright," Hikari said, dashing back up to the cart, shaking off the other shoe. "Let's get out of here."

"See? Not so bad," Takeru said, letting Hikari take a seat before spinning the cart around. "Anyway, what do you think?"

"A-about what?" Hikari asked.

"About being a pre-academy instructor. How do _you_ feel about it? That's more important than what other people think."

Hikari cleared her throat, setting her shoes down on the bottom of the cart by her feet. "They're probably right. Or at least have a really good point, I just...I really like kids. I really like working with them, I wanted to have a job where I'd be around a lot of kids." She leaned back. "So of course I'd be alive during an era of overpopulation terror, where you can't walk down the block without seeing a government poster about the perils of having children."

"I think that's beautiful," Takeru said, as he drove the cart back up the beach incline, towards the walkway above.

"Huh?" Hikari turned to look at Takeru.

"You really like kids, you want to work with them," Takeru said. "That's beautiful to me. You're doing it because you have a passion for the field."

When Takeru got the cart back up to the concrete, he leaned forward and flipped the switch on the center console back. It began to slowly cruise down the walkway, heading back in the direction it had come from.

"How many people get to do that these days? How many people actually pursue what they have a real love for? Not very many, in my experience, everyone just wants to...get somewhere they can just grind for forty years." He reached over to rub her shoulder. "That's more important than what other people say about the future of the field based off of...projections of the future that may or may not happen."

"T-thank you," Hikari said, cheeks blushing a bit again.

"And loving being around kids, also...you don't see that so much. I think that's awesome, wanting to be around kids. Kids at that age too, a lot of people aren't into that." He leaned in closer towards her. "If you keep your passion for it up, you're going to be fine. Whatever happens with the birth rate, there are always going to be kids, so...your honest passion for the profession will keep you afloat. That's what really counts. If you have that, the rest takes care of itself." Takeru nodded firmly. "So you keep your passion, and everything's going to work out."

Hikari smiled, looking back down at her feet, subconsciously rubbing the back of her head. "Thank you so much, I...I needed to hear that."

Takeru glanced up in front of him, seeing the cart parking area coming up. "Well, I'll drive you home? You'll have to direct me."

OOO

"What's your real name?"

Takeru blinked a couple times, eyelids fluttering, before looking over at Hikari.

"I'm sorry?" Takeru asked.

"TK, I...a little bit of anonymity is fine, but me just knowing your initials is a little odd if we're actually...going to be seeing each other again," Hikari explained. "So, uh...if it'd be okay, what's your actual name?"

"You've already got it," Takeru said. "Believe it or not, TK is my first name. The letter T, followed by the letter K."

Hikari broke out into a small grin. "Really?"

Takeru's car was parked out in front of Hikari's apartment complex, idling right in front of the main doors, the outside world nearly dormant at this semi-late hour.

"I mean, I kind of like it," Takeru continued. "Nobody else has that name. Hard to be mistaken for anyone else. Distinctive."

"I...I'll give you that," Hikari admitted.

"TK Takaishi, kind of sounds like the name for a piece of chemistry equipment," Takeru suggested. "I think so, anyway."

"Um, so...I had a wonderful time tonight," Hikari said, leaning over the center console towards Takeru. "Except for the part where I...looked like a complete moron pointlessly trying to impress you," She said the last part quickly.

"Oh, that's what it was," Takeru said with a small laugh.

"A-and...still, I have no idea why you're interested in me, and you're way out of my league, and I consider myself the luckiest girl in the world to have gotten your attention," she looked up at him. "Just going to go ahead and put all that out on the table, you...you're not like the other guys I've known in my life."

"Oh, go on, go on, music to my ears," Takeru said, beckoning towards her.

"So, it'd be very stupid for me to say anything to jeopardize whatever this is, but...my conscious demands that I mention something," Hikari said, biting her lower lip.

"Well, that can't possibly guide you wrong," Takeru said. "Go ahead."

"I'd really like to see you again," Hikari said. "I would. I mean, if you're still interested. But, like I told you earlier...I have sixty hour work weeks, and I try to cram in as much studying as I can between those shifts. Really, in a lot of ways, it's like I'm still back at academy. So...I don't have a lot of spare time in my calendar. I'm willing to do whatever it takes to make something work with the time I have, but...it's not going to be very much."

Takeru nodded. "Fine by me. You just keep pursuing your goals, they're too noble to not pursue. I'll make it work with whatever you have left."

Hikari gave a soft smile, reaching up to play with her hair. "Man, I...how am I here?"

"Don't talk like that," Takeru scolded. "Makes it sound like you don't deserve it."

"I don't think I do!" Hikari said, tilting her head back. "At least, I don't see how I do, it...it's just confusing!"

"Credit your...absolutely stunning pair of legs," Takeru said. "Caught my eye."

"Gymnastics, cheerleading and dance at academy, endless shifts waiting tables, finally paid off," Hikari said quietly.

"Gymnastics, cheerleading _and_ dance?" Takeru repeated. "Wow, I'm dating a superhero."

"So, we are dating, then?" Hikari dared to ask.

"I don't know what else to call it," Takeru said, reaching over and grabbing Hikari's left hand. "You have a wonderful night, be seeing you very soon."

Gently, he pulled her hand up, then bent his head down towards her fingers and softly kissed the backs of them. He glanced up as he did so, seeing her cheeks go red, and he was happy to see she made no move to pull away from him.

"Thank you so much for the ride," Hikari said. "It was a lovely night. Keep in contact."

She turned towards the passenger door and pushed it open. "And thank you for...the shoes thing." She turned back to him, giving a resigned look. "I...actually did kind of need them."

"Think nothing of it," Takeru said, Hikari pushing the door shut and spinning on her heel towards the front doors. Takeru nodded to himself, then slowly began pulling back out onto the street.

OOO

"Buddy, this is...it's nothing," Takeru assured him. "She's in the palm of my hand. Head over heels."

Koushiro nodded. "But you didn't get anything from her yet?"

Takeru raised an eyebrow. "Buddy, first date, give me a break. What, I'm gonna start prying into that sort of stuff immediately? Like that isn't weird. You gotta give me time."

To Koushiro's credit, he had indeed found a lovely condominium, an impressive rectangular structure divided up into four living areas, with a communal pool right outside. Takeru had been granted the bottom right area, a hundred and fifty square meter living space with two floors. Meant for more than just one young male adult, certainly, but Takeru could certainly find a use for the extra space. A large living room, suitable for all sorts of parties and get togethers, dominated the downstairs, a large pit in the middle of the room which played host to half a dozen pieces of furniture and an eighty-inch television screen atop a large black cabinet. Neighboring this area was the kitchen, a full strip of linoleum dedicated to cabinets and cooking surfaces. Takeru and Koushiro were meeting in this very kitchen, Takeru leaning up against the fridge as Koushiro stood in the middle of the kitchen.

Behind Takeru was a hallway that led to a series of lesser rooms, as well as the spiral staircase that went up to the more specialty chambers, which Takeru would be manipulating for his own desires in the very near future. All in all, it was a very impressive abode, and one that would serve Takeru's purposes many times over.

"Alright, you've got time, but...don't abuse it. The sooner we have answers, the better," Koushiro urged.

"So, I'm assuming you didn't come here just to try to micromanage my love life," Takeru said, crossing his arms over his chest.

"Don't call it your love life," Koushiro warned. "Don't get any ideas, and remember what you're doing this for," he continued. "That girl is maybe the only person in the world who might be able to finger you, the only person who might be able to hand you over to the state. You knowingly spending time around her is a big risk, and you're only doing it until you know what you need to know." He blinked a couple times. "You are keeping her at arm's length, right?"

"She thinks my name is TK, so there's that," Takeru said, pursing his lips. "Used my mother's maiden name too, so there's no concern about her looking up Ishidas. Oh, yeah, I had to lie about what happened to my parents, so I just feel great about that."

"You told her your parents are alive?" Koushiro asked.

"No, I told her they're dead, just...fudged the details of how a bit," Takeru answered, scratching the back of his head. "Not my favorite thing I've ever done, but...they'd understand."

"Alright, just...keep it that way."

"Yeah, yeah," Takeru muttered. "Now, what do you have for me?"

"No funds yet. Very close though," Koushiro answered, reaching into his outer jacket pockets and pulling out two cylinders, both about the size of cans of soda, one red and the other green. "I do, however, have a couple sharp little kicks."

Takeru's eyes widened, discussion of Hikari tabled momentarily as he leaned in towards the two devices. "They're that small now?!"

"If you have the money for it, sure," Koushiro said, going over and setting them down on the counter. "And I mean some serious money. But this is the only way, can't have you rolling a barrel over to a power plant relay without getting picked off."

"So…" Takeru pointed at the red one.

"That's the electro magnetic pulse," Koushiro said. "Twenty years ago, you needed a charge the size of a mack truck to get the kind of power this baby has. Give us another decade and we'll be able to put one on an earring."

"That means this one is the fizzer," Takeru said, picking up the green one. "Wow, look how far we've come."

"So that's everything we need to put on a real show," Koushiro enthused. "I say we put it on tomorrow morning, when the shift change happens."

Takeru took in a deep breath through his nostrils, then nodded. "Well. It can't be more dramatic than planting a sniper round into the temple of an oil billionaire, so...how can I possibly say no?"


	8. Outage

Chapter Seven: Outage

OOO

Sorry this one took so long, guys, I got pulled into assorted other things going on in my life.

OOO

"So, here's my main takeaway from all this," Lily said, sitting on the corner of Hikari's bed, twisting her body around to look at Hikari. "You went on your first date with this guy, he saw your panties, and you removed two items of clothing with him. I think that's phenomenal."

Hikari pinched the bridge of her nose, shaking her head. "I was so close to just dropping down to the water and swimming to the nearest island, living out the rest of my life as a primitive jungle dweller, just to make sure I never had to confront the consequences of doing that."

"Oh, it was memorable," Lily assured her. "He's going to remember that, that's worth something."

"All of a sudden, I was nine years old again, trying to impress a cute boy by doing a perfect form somersault," Hikari groaned. "Oh, what the hell was I thinking? Things were going well, too."

"Things _went_ well," Lily pointed out. "Did you or did you not receive every indication that he wanted to see you again?"

Hikari rolled her eyes, putting her hands up behind her head and leaning back on the bed so she was looking up at the ceiling. "Right before he dropped me off, I...I decided to put all the cards on the table." She bit her lower lip. "I wasn't really sure what I could do, I felt like I had just blown it, so...I didn't think I had anything to lose. Just told him that I thought he was amazing, and that he was way out of my league and I didn't know why he had any interesting in me, just...completely kissing his ass. Gave him the upper hand in the relationship, probably sounded kind of pathetic."

"So...it worked?" Lily asked. "I guess, right? And let's be real, this guy _knew_ he had the upper hand here anyway, you didn't tell him anything that he wasn't already thinking."

"Well, unless he was lying," Hikari mused. "You know, it's impossible to know, but...I almost felt like he wanted to see me again...anyway. Weird, right?"

"No, you're great, why wouldn't he want to see you again?" Lily asked.

"Gosh, I want a mulligan on last night," Hikari groaned. "Started out great, I...I decided to just be relaxed and playful, and he seemed to be eating it up. He even straight up complimented me on it and everything, and I was so...proud of myself. I was tempted to just be reserved, but my instincts were right, and then...then I'm trying to show-off like a little kid." She pursed her lips. "Basically groveled my way into another chance. If that's what happened."

"Don't think about it like that," Lily insisted, Hikari crossing her right foot over her left. "Maybe he just thinks you're beautiful, you're his type, who knows?"

"I just...I know I can leave a better first impression than that," Hikari said, shaking her hair out of her face. "And if the impression I gave really did give me a second date, then…"

"Oh, you...you probably haven't seen the news the last couple days, have you?" Lily asked.

"No," Hikari answered. "Why?"

OOO

"How long do you think it's gonna be before they decide that they need to be able to see everything that happens in forests?" Takeru asked, slipping the grey cap onto the top of his head.

"The real question is, do they just put cameras everywhere, or just burn the trees down?" Ken countered. "They get rid of the canopy, the satellites take care of it."

"They can't do that," Takeru replied. "Well, maybe make it look like an accident, or blame it on someone else."

"Actually, I think that's just perfect. Start massive forest fires everywhere, justify increased government funding for reforestation efforts, meanwhile the satellites they already have now get to see everything that happens in the woods." Ken put a pair of black-rimmed glasses on his face. "Wouldn't shock me a bit."

"Well, let's enjoy the last vestige of privacy while we have it."

The two of them wore matching grey uniforms, simple long-sleeved button shirts and long pants. The back of the van afforded little privacy for the two, as well as limited room to stand up.

Takeru shoved two thin pieces of rubber into his mouth, placing them up against his upper jaw, in his cheeks. With the additional space taken up inside his mouth, the pronouncement of his cheekbones was increased, altering the makeup of his face.

"Ugh," Takeru grunted. "I never had braces, but if I had to imagine what it'd be like…"

"It's just for a little bit," Ken assured him, going over to the back hatch of the van. "Alright, let's move."

Outside the van, a thick arrangement of trees extended out in every direction, vines snaking all along the thick wooden trunks. Untamed and unmanaged by humankind, there was a randomness and haphazardness to it all that you didn't get in the city. Ken dropped down to the dirt, Takeru right behind him. Both of them turned to grab a Retza MP submachine gun from the back of the van, then turned and made due east.

"Red alert's gonna be permanently kicked off after this," Ken said as the two trekked through the wild dirt path, through the trees, towards a large clearing just a couple hundred meters away. "The jewelry store, Lunkin, now this...gonna be hard to find room to breathe."

"Worth it," Takeru assured him. "Very worth it."

The next few minutes passed in relative silence, and the two of them soon came out from the tree line and into a large grass clearing. A large white dome was in the center of this open area, with thick, black cables extending out the sides. The cables extended off in both directions for miles and miles.

Takeru and Ken glanced at each other and nodded, then took off in opposite directions, each one following the path approximated by the cables. In the distance, each could make out a couple sentries, wearing the exact same uniform they were, armed with the exact same weapon.

OOO

"It's been a very, very long time since someone got assassinated like this," Lily said, holding the small tablet up so Hikari could see it from the bed. The screen displayed simple black text on a white background. "This guy, bona fide billionaire, money in his veins, important family going back centuries...people like that, they always live to be a hundred and five before kicking it."

Hikari nodded, feeling as if she should be more shocked and interested than she was. Yes, she was aware enough to understand that a comically wealthy man getting assassinated in public was hugely significant and incredibly rare, but she couldn't quite muster the fascination to think about it much more than that. "He got shot?"

"Head got blown off," Lily said. "Theodore Lunkin, if...if there was going to be an important guy getting his head blown off in public, you would never have guessed it was this guy."

"I...I know the name," Hikari said passively. "You'll, uh...have to forgive me if I don't know much else."

"Oh, you gotta be kidding me," Lily said, turning to look at her. "He's an academy donor, gives hundreds of millions to the big five northeast academies."

"Well, I didn't go to any of those academies, or ever really consider it, so...it's a little off my radar." Hikari pursed her lips, scratching at the side of her face.

"I always thought I'd be safe, living in a city this big and crowded," Lily murmured. "I always felt safe here, and now...now we've got jewelry stores being robbed in broad daylight, a billionaire walks out of a gentleman's club and gets his face caved in...it's weird. Feels like we're living in a...a third world anarchy all of a sudden."

"That's maybe a tad extreme," Hikari suggested. "It's, uh...it's definitely different, though, you're right."

"You had a gun pointed at you!" Lily said, a little bit of colorful drama to her tone. "I mean, I didn't think we'd ever even see a gun for the rest of our lives here except for security and police!"

Hikari could only silently ponder that fact as Lily scrolled her finger along the small tablet in her hand.

"The information being released is pretty crazy, I read about it for hours after I got home yesterday," Lily continued, Hikari passively listening. "At the exact moment of the shot being fired, a bunch of lights started flickering on and off in the apartment windows from the building it came from, so they couldn't immediately figure out where it came from. And then when they got the right room, they found hair from hundreds of different people on the floor."

"How is that even possible?" Hikari asked, scratching Miko's belly as her cat came over to lay down beside her on the bed.

"The shooters must have set it up for that," Lily explained. "These guys were real professionals. That's what makes it so weird that a guy like Lunkin would be the target, he's one of the people who supports the powers-that-be more than anyone else."

OOO

"The drinking water dispenser up ahead at post eighteen is almost empty. I already sent in the request, don't know when they'll be through."

Takeru, glad that the hot morning sun provided an excuse for him to be sweaty, nodded and grunted at the armed sentry who was heading back the way Takeru had come from. No sense in say anything if he didn't need to.

"So try to take it easy on hydration there," the sentry continued as Takeru continued forward past him. "Might have to last all day."

The primary power grid for the entire city, and the surrounding substations, would definitely be a prime target for anyone with nefarious intentions, as a little sabotage could knock out the power for entire city blocks. So, of course, dozens of guards with automatic weapons patrolled the stations, ready to defend the grid by any means necessary. Fortunately, the area that needed to be protected was so large, slipping a couple extra guards into the patrol could easily go unnoticed for at least a few minutes, and nobody would think too hard about an unfamiliar face among their ranks, so Takeru and Ken had been able to slot into the procession without incident. Before long, satellites would pick up on the additional sentries and send out alerts to investigate, but both Takeru and his friend would be gone by then.

Takeru looked up at the thick cabling above his head, extending off into the distance in front of him, supported every few hundred meters by metal towers that extended up around the treetops. Slowly, he eased himself to a halt, looking behind him to see there was nobody approaching, then pulled a small, square-shaped screen from his front shirt pocket. He peeked down at it, looking at a live feed of a bedroom, a camera perched on top of a dresser looking straight at a clock on a bedstand. Meanwhile, his left hand reached behind him, going underneath his shirt and pulling a red metal can from his waist.

After a couple anxious moments, Takeru throwing looks behind him, it happened. The screen went dark. Immediately, Takeru twisted the top of the canister violently to the left, then wrenched it back to the right.

As expected, Takeru felt nothing as a tiny indicator light on the side of the can blinked a couple times before going dead. Immediately, Takeru began a brisk march back towards the forest line, aware that all of the sentries around were about to wonder why their communications systems had just gone dead.

OOO

"We've still got fifteen minutes before we have to leave, so...what do I have to say to get you properly outraged about this?" Lily asked, tossing the tablet down on the bed by Hikari's foot.

"I don't know," Hikari said, putting her hands out at her sides. "Just...I know it's a big deal, I just can't quite muster the ability to personally care that much. He was a really rich guy, and some people who—"

A quick flicker to darkness, and then, the lights went dead. The room dimmed considerably, only sunlight trickling in from behind the blinds providing any illumination. Subconsciously, Hikari pulled her knees closer to her chest, toes curling against the blankets beneath her.

"Oh, boy," Lily said, putting her hands on her hips and standing up, looking around the room. "Yeah, it's...it's not coming back."

Hikari held out hope that it might flash back to life for another second after Lily proclaimed this, before accepting that it was an actual outage and not a flicker.

"Alright, just don't open the fridge before we leave," Lily said, looking back over at Hikari. "Oh, right, you're scared the dark."

"No!" Hikari hissed in reply. "No, I'm not, I just don't like the dark. I'm not scared of it," she insisted. "It's depressing. I don't like it, that's all."

"Right," Lily said. "You don't suppose...I mean, we're not _that_ far away from the bistro."

Hikari was about to slide off the side of the bed, then froze with her legs dangling off the side.

"They...they must have backup generators, right?" Hikari suggested.

Lily shrugged. "This building is supposed to have backup generators too. It's possible."

Hikari finished her slide off the bed, getting to her feet. "Hey, let's check the first floor on the way out. Maybe only the expensive apartments get power from backup generators."

OOO

"Oh, Iori, buddy, I'm proud of this one," Koushiro said gleefully. "Like, this might just be my masterpiece. Lot of moving pieces on this one."

"Let the guy run through it again," Takeru suggested. "He's so happy with himself, he wants to tell anyone who can listen all about it. And there aren't very many people who can listen. Let him have this one."

Iori gave a mock sigh. "Alright, Koushiro...please, enlighten me, for what purpose did I lose my power for six hours today? What was my sacrifice for?"

Koushiro's apartment was a spider web, at the same time a chaotic and complex array of wiring and electronics, and an elegantly put-together ode to technology and information. A glance at Koushiro's purchase list would make the average person assume he was an obsessive gamer, building advanced computers one after the other. The reality was, while Koushiro certainly enjoyed his hobbies, he had covered a good portion of his apartment in large computer screens, projecting the user interface from a series of powerful computers, so that he could be on top of everything happening in the world at any moment, as well as exercise absolute control over situations.

"It's like this," Koushiro started, leaning back in his wheeled chair. "So, as we all know, there's nothing that the government values more than information. Information on the citizens. Their very seat of power is constructed atop knowing everything about everyone. So, the databanks they have, filled to the brim with this information, it's not good enough for them to have just one copy of it." He shook his head. "Of course, they're way too smart for that. They put partial copies of that stuff everywhere, duplicate it a dozen times over, make absolute sure that even a complete disaster won't make them lose anything."

"It took awhile," Ken interjected. "But we found one of these backup servers." He jerked his head to the right. "Right near the primary power grid dome. Twenty feet underground inside a modified bank vault. Data on every single person currently living in this city, all compiled in one room."

"Getting to it physically is basically out of the question," Koushiro continued. "The entryway is a trap door two miles from the actual room. So, we needed a long-range solution." He gestured over at Ken. "That's where these two came in. I gave Ken a electronic surge, he plugged it in at one of the breaker boxes close to the grid dome. Massive pulse of energy getting jammed into the powerlines. Took out power in a couple dozen city blocks, and most importantly, knocked out the shielding around the safe room. Which opened the door for…" he pointed over at Takeru.

"I detonated an EMP from right above the server," Takeru threw in, putting his hands up behind his head. "Fried everything inside, but more importantly, wiped the servers clean. All the data, gone."

"And the state doesn't care for having any of their backup sites wiped, so...everything that happened after was predictable." Koushiro pointed at his computer screen, showing a zoomed-out map of the world. "As soon as they realized their server blades were dead, they rushed in replacements. Now, the secondary sites, in the event of data loss, are to link up with one of the primary server rooms to get new copies of the data, so as soon as the replacements were plugged in, they connected."

"And you traced the connection, and now you know where a primate server site is," Iori finished.

"Wrong!" Koushiro said. "No, can't do that without risking myself getting caught. Luckily, these primary server rooms draw a lot of power when they turn on, so all I had to do was watch global power grids and find which one had a sudden uptick, then follow it. And, after a little following, gentlemen, we now know the exact location of a primary server site. And based off the power surge when it turned on, this is a real motherlode."

"Private citizen data is just the start," Ken added. "Oh, they've probably got data on every single citizen in this country there, but...you better believe this place has a lot more than that."

"You're not actually talking about getting in there, are you?" Iori asked. "That sounds like a great way to cut your life short really quickly."

"No. Course not." Koushiro cleared his throat. "But, knowing exactly where it is will be valuable in the near future. I can tell you for certain that we're not the first people to try to find these server locations, so like-minded people out there know how valuable those sites are. Unfortunately, there's no way for us to know how far those attempts got, or what they managed to discover, but...someone, somewhere, is going to break through."

"And, near as I can tell, we got away with it," Takeru threw in. "That's kind of a big deal. Couldn't have done it without the canopy. Thank you, forests."

"Now, I'm sure today is the last straw," Ken pointed out, leaning over Koushiro's shoulder and looking at the map on the screen, various pinpricks of light marking areas of high power usage. "We're about to see some serious increases in security and surveillance, gonna be a lot harder to maneuver. Now's probably a good time to start collecting resources and assets through trusted sources, keep us off of enemy territory."

"Well, good opportunity to keep Jyou in business," Takeru mused. "Wish I had a basement. Storing a bunch of outlawed items above ground isn't nearly as comforting."

"And don't buy a bunch of giant safes, please," Koushiro warned. "Anyone who puts a target on their forehead like that deserves whatever happens to them in prison."

OOO

"Terribly sorry, sir, there's no way for us to grill anything right now," Hikari said, trying to balance looking cheerful and upbeat while breaking bad news to a customer, all without appearing rude or disrespectful, a balancing act that was starting to wear on her.

"Well, then what the hell are you guys even open for?!"

Hikari tried not to flinch at the aggressively irritated patron, who seemed to be blaming her particularly for the restaurant's limited ability to serve customers right now.

"W-we do have a temporary menu with the items we can offer right now," Hikari persisted. "We're still capable of serving a limited selection of dishes, things that don't require the grill or any of the electronic appliances."

"Eugh," he grunted, looking angry enough to assault Hikari, but settling instead for looking down at the floor next to him in disgust. "Well, fine then, just...fine! I'll take the turkey club, then."

"W-we can do that," Hikari said. "N-now, we won't be able to...to do the soup right now-"

"Obviously!" he spat, motivating Hikari to quickly backtrack towards the back hallway of the restaurant, eager to remove herself from the dining room.

"Phew," Hikari grunted, quickly staggering over to the small panel in the wall and sliding it open. "Turkey club," she said quickly, shuttering it closed immediately.

"No extra spittle?"

Hikari turned around, finding fellow Fuku Bistro waitress Sonia, a red-haired beauty from a tropical island territory near the equator that Hikari could never remember the full name of.

"Oh, I really reeeeeally wanted to," Hikari admitted. "I...I just don't have it in me. If I don't have it in me for that kind of customer, then I'm just never going to have it."

"You okay?" Sonia asked.

"No!" Hikari said, slightly more snappy than she might have wanted to. "It's miserable enough in this place in the best of times, but it's just plain cruel and unusual with no air conditioning!" She turned around, peeking back out at the sparsely populated restaurant. "Why are these people even here?! It's awful in here, go to the beach or the movie theater or something! How can you not be miserable in here?!" she hissed.

"Calm down," Sonia suggested, coming up to touch Hikari's back. Hikari gave a tiny shiver, feeling her damp uniform touch up against her skin. "If they weren't here, then we wouldn't have a shift."

"I'm willing to make that trade," Hikari mumbled, reaching into her left-hip pocket and pulling out a white hankerchief, wiping her forehead down with it. "How are you dealing with it?"

"This is nothing compared to what I grew up in," she replied easily.

"Oooohhhh," Hikari grunted. "Whoever caused this power outage needs to be launched into the sun."

OOO

"We've got money now," Takeru said, speaking slowly and deliberately. "It's...it's so liberating. Such a good feeling to not have to worry about funding for awhile. It's like...like how we felt when we hit those bearer bonds, but this is...this is way more big league."

Yamato, seated in a small recliner right by the curtained-off window on the far side of the small bedroom, slowly nodded. "That's really good."

"If you...if you watch the news, you're probably...hearing about me and the guys," Takeru acknowledged. "Don't know how much you're paying attention to...to stuff outside. But we're doing some really great stuff."

"Great," Yamato said, eyes wandering towards the window, looking out at the brick wall a handful of meters away.

Takeru swallowed down hard. "Uh...we actually killed someone. Uh, for a good reason, of course." He nodded rapidly. "Lunkin, we got him coming out of a gentleman's club. Sniper, too. Got away with it."

"Cool." Yamato rubbed at the top of his head and crossed his right leg over his left knee. "I had chinese food last night."

Takeru winced. "G-great."

Yamato picked up a pencil from the windowsill to his right, holding it loosely between his thumb and forefinger in front of him. He began to vibrate his hand up and down, creating the visual illusion of the pencil bending like rubber, up and down.

"And we took out the power in a ten block radius in a part of the city," Takeru continued. "N-nothing over here, so you might not have noticed, but...yeah, we managed to use the outage to find the location of one of the primary server rooms. Pretty useful information."

"Cool." Yamato set the pencil back down on the window. He blinked down hard a few times. "That's great."

Takeru grimaced, uncomfortably adjusting himself around in the chair. The room was just so...sterile, he was already uncomfortable. There wasn't anything going on inside. Essentially an entirely white room, it felt like a hospital room more than anything else. Just a bed, a couple chairs, and a television, with some magazines and notepads on a table next to the bed. A square window with a white curtain provided the only hint of flavor. Takeru was just so used to being in places far more interesting than this.

"Oh, and...well, the circumstances are sort of weird, I don't want to get into it too much...but I met this girl. Seen her a few times, and...I'll cut out the boring stuff, but it's been nice."

Yamato twitched his neck a couple times, eyes darting up to look over at his younger brother. "Oh? A girl? How?"

Takeru was taken slightly aback. He blinked a few times, but then continued.

"Uh...I just met her by chance. She's a waitress. Uh, really nice, really sweet girl."

"You, uh...you can do that?" Yamato asked, seemingly finally interested in something Takeru was saying. Takeru wasn't going to abandon that development.

"W-well, like I said, the circumstances are complicated," Takeru replied. "I have...well, I have a few reasons for doing it, but...but yeah, I can do that. I have enough time, and...you just have to manage things smartly. And this girl, she seems really into me, she's totally my type, so...sometimes in life, you just have to go with things."

Yamato nodded. "Well. I like that." He swallowed down heavily, his eyes focusing a bit as he looked out the window again. "She's nice?"

"Yeah, very," Takeru affirmed. "She's just this girl, right out of academy, working herself half to death at a restaurant, trying to become a teacher, and...okay, what happened was, she was...she was inside the jewelry store when we robbed it. A-and, she didn't get knocked out, and—"

Takeru stopped himself after seeing Yamato's eyes start wandering around the room again. He bit his lip.

"Y-yeah, sorry, that...that doesn't matter," Takeru muttered, standing up and going over to his brother. "Alright, I...that's what's going on, exciting stuff. I'll get out of your way now, have a good night."

"That's good," Yamato said, reaching up towards Takeru's fist and tapping his palm against Takeru's knuckles a couple times.

Takeru nodded and quickly turned away, going for the one door in or out of the room. He eagerly departed the dull, milquetoast chamber, gently shutting the door behind him, finding Jyou standing just a couple feet away from the threshold in a dark indoor hallway.

"Were you listening, by any chance?" Takeru asked, locking the door by twisting a tab on the doorknob.

"No, man, I don't do that kind of stuff," Jyou said, holding up a couple of cylinder-shaped batteries in his right hand. "Just passing through. How'd it go?"

Takeru took in a large huff of breath. "He...he actually seemed to react to something. To acknowledge something I said."

"Oh yeah?" Jyou replied, putting the batteries back into his right pants' pocket. "That's...that's pretty rare."

"Rare?" Takeru said with a bitter laugh. "From my perspective, it's the first time."

Jyou nodded. "I'm telling you, man, it's...it's a long process, but things are improving. I just have to stick to the plan with him, and...it might be years, don't get me wrong, but...things will get better. Just keep coming by and talking to him, you'll notice improvement. His condition is something that he can come back from."

Takeru reached up and patted Jyou's shoulder. "Thanks for all the help, man. I couldn't ever deal with him right now, much less work to make him better, so...thanks."

Jyou grinned. "Hey, what kind of guy would I be if I didn't?" He jerked his head back down the hallway behind him. "You wanna go bundle all the stuff you bought up?"


End file.
